Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine) 3030686035, 9783030686031

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction Novel Ecologies

Barri J. Gold

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine Series Editors Sharon Ruston Department of English and Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK Alice Jenkins School of Critical Studies University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK Jessica Howell Department of English Texas A&M University College Station, TX, USA

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones. Editorial board Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, UK Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony Brook University, USA Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA Jessica Howell, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University, USA Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies, University of Oxford, UK Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania State University, USA Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14613

Barri J. Gold

Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-­ Century Fiction Novel Ecologies

Barri J. Gold Muhlenberg College Allentown, PA, USA

ISSN 2634-6435     ISSN 2634-6443 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ISBN 978-3-030-68603-1    ISBN 978-3-030-68604-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68604-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In loving memory of Len Gold, for his ability to sing even when things seemed at their worst, his admonitions against giving up, and his profound sense that we cannot be our best in isolation.

Acknowledgments

Like everything else, this book derives from the entangled energies of many people and systems. I would like to thank Muhlenberg College for its ongoing financial support and especially for the 2012–13 Donald B. Hoffman Fellowship and the 2019–20 Research Professorship, which provided what seems such a scarce resource—time. I am extremely grateful to my dear friends and colleagues Sumangala Bhattacharya, Jen Camden, and Katarina Gephardt, without whose conversations and patience with early drafts, this book and the experience of writing it would have been far less rich. I am grateful to the many people who make up the intellectual ecology where fledgling ideas are nurtured into articulation, especially the members of the British Society for Literature and Science and Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies. Special thanks also go to Laney Gold-Rappe, Julie Weiner, and Jennifer Moretti for their careful attention to the final drafts and to Francesca Coppa and Heidi Reicher for their enduring and energetic support. Finally, I wish to express my love and gratitude to my family, especially my “housies” Estelle, Laney, Kendall, and Andrew for the meaning and hope they have brought to this book and to everyday life.

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Praise for Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction “Barri Gold’s eminently readable new book builds on her previous work in bridging the sciences and humanities. The first half of the book provides scientific, historical, and theoretical contexts that underpin the ‘ecologically-informed readings’ of familiar nineteenth-century novels in the second half. Gold’s enviable skill is in presenting complex ideas so that they are easily understood. I’ve taught excerpts from her chapters on Jane Eyre and Great Expectations in undergraduate courses: they work well as stand-alone arguments, while advanced students will appreciate the attention to historical and theoretical contexts in the first half.” —Jennifer Camden, Associate Chair and Professor, English, University of Indianapolis, USA

Contents

1 Prologue  1 Reading “Nature”   3 What Words Have to Do with It, Or, the Bounds of Scientific Thought   7 Ecological Beings  13 Energy and Ecocriticism  15 2 Energy, Form, and the Novel 17 The Laws of Thermodynamics  17 The Forms of Energy  20 Closed Systems, Open Ecologies  23 The Individual  28 Closure as Novelistic Form  32 Reading with Energy  34 3 The Physics of Life: Darwin, Thomson, Joule, Boltzmann 37 Resolvable Differences  38 Ecological Entanglement  43 Boltzmann’s Chemical Kitchen  45 The Machinery of Life  48 What Is Waste?  53 How Darwin Handles Waste  58 Darwin’s (Mis)Uses of Energy  62

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CONTENTS

4 Experimental Reading 69 An Unperfected Recipe for Reading Novel Ecologies  72 Trouble “Nature”; Presume Not Innocent  72 Be Wary of Scarcity and Closure  73 Follow the Energy  75 Pursue Entanglement at Every Scale  76 Multiply and Move Perspectives  78 Flip the Metaphor  79 You Do You  80 5 Austen’s Emergent Energies: Mansfield Park 83 Part 1: Nature’s Entanglements  85 Romantic Nature  85 The Taste of Apricots  90 The Natural Look  93 But What About the Wilderness?  95 Part 2: Before the Victorians  97 Scarcity  97 Energy and the Closed System  99 Circumlocutions 101 6 Jane Eyre: From Heroic Energies to Sympathetic Ecologies105 (Dis)Closure 105 Energy and Nature 107 Independence and Mastery 110 Heroic Energies, Imperial Fictions 112 The Price of Independence 114 The Way of the Heroine 117 Close to the Borderline 121 Hostile Environments 123 Traitorous Energies 127 Sympathetic Ecologies 129 The Other Side of the Metaphor 132 7 Fictions of Closure and Toxic Obfuscation in Great Expectations137 Toxic Penetrations: Pip on the Marshes 139 Fictions of Sufficiency 141

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Problems of Place 145 Toxic Obfuscations 147 Jaggers, The Great Obfuscator 150 An Aside on Recycling: The Avenger 151 Living in the Semiosphere 154 Walworth Salad 158 8 Narrative Energies & The War of the Worlds163 Part 1: Ecological Catastrophe 164 Great Disillusionment 164 Black Smoke 165 Setting Suns & Malthusian Traps 168 Part 2: Narrative Troubles 170 Tech Solutions 170 Invasive Species 171 We Are All Martians 174 The Trouble with Apocalypse 175 Part 3: A Novel Experiment 179 The Open Book 180 Rethinking the Individual 182 Cognitive Dissonance, Perspectival Agility 183 Shifting Alliances, Provisional Knowledge 187 An Afterword on Closure193 Glossary of Ecocritical Terms197 Works Cited203 Index211

CHAPTER 1

Prologue

This is a book about reading—about how we read and how we can read differently in a world driving toward ecological catastrophe. It presumes that stories matter; for better and worse, they have and will continue to shape us and the way we live in the world. It is a book about books—favorite books that we read again and again, books that we study and teach, books that become movies, books that we still relate to a century or two after they were first published—Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, The War of the Worlds. It is a book about tradition and a book about change. Skeptical and hopeful, it asks how our knowledge of literary and scientific histories and the conversation between them can help us address the problems of a planet in distress. It worries about some of the effects of these favorite books, especially the possibility that they do much to preserve the status quo, perpetuating regrettable ideologies and apparently natural beliefs. But, knowing that literature can help us to think creatively and with new eyes, it continues to hope that the same books can help us see new ways to approach some of our most intractable problems. And it experiments—modeling things we can do, but with no certainty regarding the outcomes. This book started as a series of what ifs. What would happen if we approached familiar novels with self-consciously ecological intent? How

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. J. Gold, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68604-8_1

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would they read differently? What would we find, for example, if we traced the circulation of energy in a novel written when the word energy signaled almost exclusively a quality of character, its thermodynamic sense still decades away? How would the bildungsroman look different if we attempted to resist its apparently irretrievable anthropocentrism? How would a nightmare of imperial conquest “seem to an intelligent rabbit” (WOW 100)? What if we abandoned the desire for closure and stability and sought entanglement, connectivity, and transformation instead? Addressed scarcity with less fear? Embraced multiple and mobile perspectives—not all of them human? Could we change how we read not only our books, but the world and ourselves? And could such rethinking help us to develop a more ecological culture? Why not? Such see changes are not even uncommon. Every book reads differently the second time around, and most readers can attest to the ways books mean differently when read under different personal circumstances, in a changed political landscape, or simply as one’s life experiences accumulate. Analogously, such re-visions are one of the central pleasures of studying science. If you wish to have your view of the universe changed radically and almost regularly about once every semester with each new narrative—mechanics, electromagnetism, special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics—say yes to physics. Meanwhile, on a more domestic level: it is possible, if one works at it, to experience the flicking of a light switch as connecting one bodily to a huge network of flowing electrons, the municipal infrastructure that supports that flow, the economic power that enables one’s access, the solar cells and wind mills and nuclear plants and fossil fuels and even water wheels that convert energy in so many forms to electricity, and the histories of our uses and misuses of such earthbound energies. Perhaps, then, if we keep all these stories in mind, we can flick more deliberately. And of course, this is the hope: that revised experience and revised behavior will result from reading the world with new eyes, that reading differently could actually help address some of the deeply ingrained and problematic patterns of thought that contribute to our current ecological crisis. Patterns of thought, moreover, do not respect disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, I believe that the more we police these boundaries, the more we preserve and propagate these patterns; when disciplines close ranks, they reinforce some of the patterns of isolation and closure in our thinking that need to be addressed if we are to read and think more ecologically. In Chap. 3, we will explore how disciplinary disputes trouble ecological

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science at its inception in the nineteenth century, even as multiple scientists attempt to think across the growing divisions between the science of energy and the science of evolution. Meanwhile, it is useful to explore (necessarily briefly) how tendencies toward isolation and closure can be found in the shaping of both the novelistic subject and the scientific object, the political individual, the modern nation, the protagonist, and the well-­ told tale. Opening up the borders that seem to divide these concerns is not easy, however. Even practicing ecologists may shy away from questioning the theories proffered by, say, mathematicians and physicists. How much more so, when one trained in the humanities is dealing with what may seem the exclusive province of the sciences? To literary scholars, the natural world, no matter how compelling the need, may well seem a bit beyond our touch. But neither science nor literature can be disconnected from the larger cultural problems that surround, suffuse, and draw from them. Thus, in a time of both ecological and educational crises, this book also queries the ongoing role of the humanities in addressing problems that seem to call primarily for scientific solutions.

Reading “Nature” While to some, the humanities and especially the study of language and literature have seemed irrelevant to addressing the problems of ecology that beset our world, to others, the natural world has seemed sometimes of minimal relevance to literary study. Not surprisingly, literary study is deeply engaged in understanding the human-made world. And the role of literature in perpetuating cultural troubles of various kinds has been widely canvassed. Such work has been central to literary criticism since the 1960s and 1970s and is the driving force of what is increasingly termed “suspicious” or “skeptical” reading. When we read skeptically, we work to unpack the ways that dominant ideology and the interests of those in power are perpetuated through literature: This or that story naturalizes women’s roles. This narrative promulgates racist assumptions. That one proffers a narrative of class mobility precisely in order to maintain the status quo. And if anything is presented in a novel as natural, that’s probably because someone in power really wants us to believe it so. It is perhaps not that surprising, then, that so many readers are suspicious of the “nature” they find in literature, which seems so frequently to be deployed in the service of some power class, up to and including humanity itself. Even the most committed nature poem can seem

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incredibly personal and political. Consider for example a fairly simple suspicious reading of William Wordsworth’s well-known poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud”—the one about daffodils. Even Wordsworth, nature poet par excellence, can be meaningfully called to account for his impressively anthropocentric depictions of nature. Putting aside for the moment his blithe erasure of his sister Dorothy from the scene, the daffodils themselves are thoroughly anthropomorphized: “tossing their heads in a sprightly dance.” They are depicted as putting on a show, a source of “wealth” to the poet, though he does not recognize “what wealth the show to me had brought” until well after the encounter, when alone on his couch, he recalls them. Then “they flash upon that inward eye/which is the bliss of solitude;/And then my heart with pleasure fills,/And dances with the daffodils.” From a certain perspective then, Wordsworth seems to value nature primarily in order to transcend it; the wealth of the daffodils lies in their capacity to soothe, enrich and develop both the eye and the I. Of course, this quick look at “Daffodils” is a mere gesture toward the many critiques of Wordsworth that find in his poetry more politics and economics than nature. By the end of the twentieth century, literary nature seemed to figure primarily as a metaphor or a kind of spin that positioned preferred political positions as right by arguing they are natural. This is not a new idea. Charlotte Brontë clearly had a sense of such uses of “nature” when she wrote Jane Eyre. If that novel’s innocence is compromised by its rampant pathetic fallacy, we shall also see that it is rather savvy regarding the different ways “nature” may be deployed in the interests of a power class—or even for some rather revolutionary social aspirations. It is, as Kate Soper terms it, “nature-sceptical”—at least some of the time (4–5). But perhaps some of the time is exactly what’s needed. In an attempt to balance the importance of language in making our world and the fact that nature has a life independent of our conceptions, if not precisely independent of us, Greg Garrard suggests that we cultivate a kind of double vision: The challenge for ecocritics is to keep one eye on the ways in which ‘nature’ is always in some ways culturally constructed, and the other on the fact that nature really exists, both the object and, albeit distantly, the origin of our discourse. (10)

On the one hand, we wish to respect that nature exists separate from our conceptions of it. At the same time, we cannot abandon all we may know

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about the power of language to shape reality. We can insist, with Kate Soper, “that it is not language that has a hole in the ozone layer” even as we admit the possibility that language—and politics and race and gender and all the ways we interact with each other and the rest of the natural world—may nonetheless have had something to do with its making? The fact that this “hole” seems to be getting gradually smaller since its discovery in the mid-1980s suggests that the language we use, the stories we tell, may also have something to do with its unmaking.1 The very sensitivity of literary criticism to this distinction between representation and reality, proves at once a challenge and a source of tremendous potential to literary ecology, a term I use, as others have before me, to signal a mode of ecological thinking that intersects with but is not limited to the ecological sciences, an approach by, through and to literature that seeks to engage and supplant what Plumwood calls “anthropocentric culture,” and Lorraine Code calls “epistemologies of mastery” (Chisholm 569). The challenge comes with the observation that literary depictions of nature seem so clearly shaped by human perspectives, desires, and aims, that we may be swept away by the sheer volume of human baggage. We may well find so much of human concern in every depiction of nature that we end by treating depictions of the natural world either as mere setting, as raw material for symbolic deployment, or as fuel for spiritual transcendence. A reasonably sensitive critic might therefore insist that what we find in literature is not so much real nature as represented “nature.” It thus happened that Wordsworth scholar Alan Liu can make the increasingly notorious, if frequently misunderstood assertion that “There is no nature” (38). But insisting too strongly, in this way, on the distinction between “nature” and nature may well create what Lawrence Buell has called a certain myopia in “criticism on the subject of art’s representation of nature” (Imagination 5). If literary critics attend only to the “nature” that represents and is represented, they may feel they have nothing to contribute regarding the nature that is “real.” They may steer clear of important issues that seem outside the realm of “culture,” disclaiming any right (or need) on the part of the literary scholar, to address the problems that beset real nature. 1  Of course, this is only a part of the picture. In the 1980s, two-dimensional modeling offered a corrective to the previous one-dimensional models of ozone layer. Threedimensional models seem to be a thing of the 2000s and 2010s. And (in an extremely loose analogy) two eyes, however crossed, cannot do justice to the multiplex meanings of “nature.”

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In the early waves of ecocriticism, this seemed to many to have gone too far. As Lawrence Buell suggests, it is not the poetry (or the poet) but the criticism that “tends to efface the world” (Imagination 5). Ecocritics thus prove suspicious as well, but in a different way, calling previous readers to account for forgetting or ignoring or suppressing the fact that nature also has a life distinct from its role in representing human concerns. In her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader (1996), Cheryll Glotfelty registers a startling complaint: if your knowledge of the world came from literary studies, she worries, “you would quickly discern that race, class and gender were the hot topics of the late twentieth century, but…you might never know that there was an earth at all” (xvi). First-wave ecocritics thus feel the need to reassert the presence of nature in literature. In his 1991 Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, Jonathan Bate works to resist the tendency of literary criticism, “to demand of poetry that it should solve political and social problems” (15), reminding us that we have not always read so politically, and that “the common reader’s view of Wordsworth”—that is, that he was, in fact, a nature poet, “derives from the Victorian way of reading him, John Stuart Mill’s way, John Ruskin’s, Leslie Stephen’s” (4). He calls for reading Wordsworth’s nature as nature. But reading nature as nature is a tricky business. In the critical ping pong of reading nature, reading Wordsworth’s (or anyone else’s) nature as nature, has often seemed theoretically unsubtle or excessively Romantic. As Raymond Williams has observed, “nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language,” adding that “any full history of the uses of nature would be a history of a large part of human thought” (219, 221). This complex history is riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions, not least in the moral value we ascribe to nature: “Practically a synonym for evil in the Middle Ages,” Timothy Morton observes, “nature was considered the basis of social good by the Romantic period” (EWN 15). As science was gaining social and moral authority among the Victorians, John Stuart Mill worried that all the words derived from “nature” and “natural” had accumulated so much baggage, had “become entangled in so many foreign associations…which their original meaning will by no means justify” that they had become “one of the most copious sources of false taste, false philosophy, false morality, and even bad law” (12). The Victorian biologist T. H. Huxley, known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” warns that it makes no sense to judge natural phenomena according to human values: “Viewed under the dry light of science,” he says, “deer and wolf are alike

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admirable” (198). To point to one as good and the other as evil makes no sense; to point to nature as an ideal, even less so. Indeed, as Morton observes, romanticizing nature, however unwittingly, seems to reinforce an all-too familiar set of power relations: “Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration” (EWN 3). It sets the human/male observer not only apart from, but in control of (even above, in spite of the pedestal) the natural/ female. The “common reader’s view” may thus go too far in the other direction, leaving out not only the suspicion, but also the many things we have learned from feminist, anti-racist, and postcolonial studies, and their pervasive deconstructivist tendencies, about how meaning is made. Insisting on nature as nature seems to overlook too much of what we have learned about the power of language to shape what seems real.

What Words Have to Do with It, Or, the Bounds of Scientific Thought Since the Enlightenment, science has served widely as the arbiter of nature as it “really exists.” And the nature that science depicts—nature as it supposedly is—has long served as an important form of cultural authority, a privileged means of sorting the normal from the pathological, “a way of establishing racial and sexual identity” (EWN 16), and so on. But science is not without the “foreign associations” that vex Mill. Itself a system of representation, it is laden with the same cultural value systems that shape nature in the novel. It is also constrained by its own dominant ideas about nature. And such ideas, no matter whence they come, may get in the way of our better understanding. Said otherwise, reading nature as nature is decidedly difficult when it does not conform to one’s expectations—when nature, we might say, does not align with “nature.” It depends on being able to see and remember that which is distinctive, counterintuitive, or even contrary to habit. What’s more, these are difficulties that science shares with literature. In science, however, they may be associated less with language and more with a dominant scientific theory or paradigm, the framework through which scientists view the world in a given moment. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argues that a real change in the way science views something in nature—what Kuhn calls a paradigm shift—occurs after a crisis during which scientists have

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repeated encounters that baffle their most basic premises. Until such a shift occurs, a given paradigm represents science’s view of nature as it really is. On the verge of a paradigm shift, scientists become increasingly cognizant of the difficulties of reading nature as nature, and such difficulties have preoccupied ecological thinkers since the beginning of ecological science. We may locate this beginning with Charles Darwin, an avid reader of novels, on whose paradigm-breaking Origin of Species (1859) virtually all modern biology rests. That Charles Darwin also records the challenge of internalizing something truly unexpected about nature. In his “autobiographical recollections,” he attributes part of the success of the Origin to his systematic attention to anomalies: I had…during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones. (Letters)

Darwin cops to the difficulties of seeing nature as it is, identifying a cognitive resistance to retaining a “new observation or thought …opposed to [his] general results,” which anticipates the extra-paradigmatic difficulties Kuhn registers. And this is what makes him such a great ecological thinker. As Timothy Morton reminds us A truly scientific attitude means not believing everything you think. This means that your thinking keeps encountering nonidentical phenomena, things you can’t put in a box. If the ecological thought is scientific, this implies that it has a high tolerance for negativity. (ET 230–2)

Observing, acknowledging, remembering, explaining, and (for practical purposes) acting on, new knowledge about nature is not easy. And Darwin, astute, self-aware, and extremely patient, knew it. In spite of Darwin’s importance to modern ecology, few scientists have read Darwin in the original, and some of the ideas that suffuse his written work have remained a bit hard for science to swallow. Even T. H. Huxley shared “a mystifying metaphysical faith in the perfect ‘economy’ of the natural order” in which nothing is wasted, although Darwin’s work, as well as the second law of thermodynamics had firmly given the lie to that natural-theological belief (MacDuffie VLEEI 27). We will return at length

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to the ways the laws governing energy complicate this optimistic picture of a nature without waste, an impossible picture closely associated with fantasies of closure and stability. Evolution depends on change as well as cooperation and interdependence and beauty and energetic exchange. Nonetheless, the picture of a stable nature made up of self-sustaining, closed systems nonetheless persists, not only in popular conceptions but also within science. Indeed, H.G. Wells, comparing humanity to “men in a workshop full of whirling machinery,” identifies what he calls “the ‘cyclic’ delusion”—the presumption that all things in the universe return perpetually to a previous state (EW 110). But the planets, the tides, day and night “seem cyclic only through the limitation of our observation,” living as we do in an eddy, while “the great stream of the universe flows past us and onward” (113). More recently if marginally less poetically, Daniel Botkin (ecologist, planetary biologist, environmentalist …) finds himself still combating the pervasive view of nature as stable. In his landmark Discordant Harmonies, Botkin argues that contemporary scientific theory and practice reveal beliefs and expectations that nature will function with the underlying stability of a mechanical system. Mathematical and physical theory, he argues, are still driven by long-standing and largely unquestioned beliefs about a stable, ordered, purposeful, or even perfect nature. Such beliefs have dominated western science since the Enlightenment, which inherited the presumptions of stability and purpose in large part from religious belief. According to Botkin, these play “a dominant role in shaping the very character and conclusions about populations and ecosystems (i.e. about nature)” (41), leaving “current knowledge about the biosphere … out of step with current beliefs about nature” (8). This asynchrony, according to Botkin, is one of “the main impediments to progress on environmental issues” (8). Science, of course, is not alone in maintaining this overwhelming belief in nature’s stability. It is not hard to see how the novel, and indeed, how the vast majority of the stories we tell including movies, TV, and even Instagram, might collude in propagating such a belief. Nature, after all, must hold relatively still if it is to serve as the background against which human protagonists move; its stability contrasts our mobility. In turn, when in novels and poems, nature acts with less stability, it is often to reflect or foretell or facilitate or judge human feelings and actions—a phenomenon frequently termed “pathetic fallacy”—a term the Victorian critic John Ruskin first used to censure what he felt was an excess of

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sentimentality among the earlier Romantic poets. But ecological sciences fall into their own form of pathetic fallacy, often reflecting, as Botkin argues, the notion that “nature knows best,” a belief that offers little in the way of how to approach ecological problems and that often fostered donothing approaches in the environmentalism of the 1960s and 1970s. However, this overwhelming appearance of stability in our reading of nature and “nature” depends critically on the assumptions we bring to our reading. As it happens, bringing Darwin to our reading has gone a long way to our rethinking of the relations between literature and science. Since the groundbreaking work of Gillian Beer and George Levine in the 1980s, scholars interested in literature and science have explored myriad ways in which nineteenth-century literature converses with nascent evolutionary biology. In his “autobiographical recollections,” moreover, Darwin himself marvels at his own taste for novels, which he describes as “works of the imagination, though not of a very high order,” but in which he finds a “wonderful relief and pleasure” that endures even as his “higher aesthetic tastes” decline. But his taste for novels can be found reflected in (shaping or shaped by) his scientific narratives. Reading his work (as we will do in the Chap. 3 of this book) further suggests the importance of word choice in his developing and resisting ideas. We may therefore find that even within science, the challenges of reading nature as it is may be even more basic and more enduring than the paradigm. They may attach to something as small as a word or as broad as belief. This distinction between words and belief is a false one, however, for how can we have a belief without words to articulate it? We can, moreover, track our changing beliefs through our changing use of words. Consider, for example, the term “natural resource,” which was bandied about quite freely in my youth, when, as I recall, we stood in line at the pumps for the dubious privilege of paying over a dollar (!) for a gallon of gasoline.2 Now, the term “natural resource” seems almost too crass to use in the delicate hearing of eco-sensitive scholars, implying, as it does, that the natural world exists primarily for the use and benefits of humanity. Recognizing the unexamined assumptions that attach to our language facilitates and signals changing thought. And yet, the phrase, however flawed it now looks, was used quite passionately by the environmentalists of that moment. Rachel Carson, for example, refers to water as the most precious 2

 Very likely, what I remember was the fallout of the OPEC embargo of 1973.

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“of all our natural resources” in Silent Spring (1962). Carson’s thinking about natural resources was key to her writing her groundbreaking book on the dangers of pesticide use. No critique of the implications of “natural resources” can afford to forget this. The tendency to “police language,” an extreme and much ridiculed form of rather stale “political correctness,” seems to me a move in exactly the wrong direction. There is no doubt that words can be hurtful and that we should use them with care. Nonetheless, to insist that words must have always meant exactly what they mean to the current listener reduces language to a singularity and stability of meaning that language itself cannot sustain. More to the point here, insisting on the permanence of the baggage that appends to words in a given place and time, may reinforce the limitations that language may place on thought.3 This is not to deny that clarifying or even (provisionally) stabilizing meaning can be extremely useful. With notable exceptions, scientific work inclines toward fixing, even isolating meaning, at least part of the time. By contrast, in literary studies, we tend to focus on the expansiveness of language—the way meanings proliferate and connect to other words and meanings in a kind of linguistic ecology. Together, these views suggest that language exhibits—even affords—a kind of punctuated equilibrium, which, as with evolution, requires that we recognize both stability and mobility. In a passage that I have given to hundreds of undergraduates, Gillian Beer expresses this disciplinary distinction: Certain conditions of language bear particularly hard on the scientific writer whose domain of enquiry, unlike that of literature, is not primarily or necessarily the human. Language is anthropocentric; it is also historically and culturally determined; it is never neutral; and it is multivocal. It potentiates diversity of meaning. At the same time, not all potential significations are active. One of the most remarkable powers of the human mind—less often commented on that its power to proliferate senses—is its power to exclude, or suppress, feasible meanings. The terms of agreement between writer and implied reader can for the time being select and exclude significations. Thus “races”’ and “wild aboriginal stock” may be taken to refer solely to cabbages in a sentence like this from Origin of Species: “It seems to me not improba3  Anxious not to be read wrongly here, I will simply add that I have no wish to defend hate speech or even language used insensitively—quite the reverse. But simply insisting that such a word cannot/should not be used is often the end rather than the beginning of meaningful conversation—possibly even a form of what we now call “cancel culture” that effectively buries exactly that problematic history that we hope to acknowledge in censuring the word itself.

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ble, that if we could succeed in naturalising, or were to cultivate during many generations, the several races, for instance, of the cabbage, in very poor soil (in which case, however, some effect would have to be attributed to the direct action of the poor soil), that they would to a large extent, or even wholly, revert to the wild aboriginal stock.” However, as I have argued in Darwin’s Plots, such an agreement is neither permanent nor inclusive: signification may be controlled and focused within a like-minded group (particularly any professional group), but the excluded or left-over meanings of words remain potential. They can be brought to the surface and put to use by those outside the accord or professional ‘contract’, as well as by those future readers for whom new historical sequences have intervened. (OF 156 sic)

This passage, which is never far from my thoughts, suggests two very different—often separate and mostly equal—ways of using and understanding language. Both “remarkable powers of the human mind,” the selection as well as the proliferation of potential meanings can be extremely helpful for ecological thought. The selection and focusing of meaning has done much for clarity and precision, but has its own attendant problems. Darwin can learn a great deal by focusing attention on cabbages, but we can also learn a great deal about the mutual influence of science and language by exploring the additional (read: not cabbage related) baggage that may have attached to his words in his moment. We can consider how the questions he asks and the meanings he discovers are shaped, facilitated as well as limited, by the many other meanings, associations, and implications of “naturalizing” “the several races” “cultiva[tion]” and “wild aboriginal stock.” To ask in this way about the meanings that are being excluded as signification is “controlled through and focused within a like-minded group” may be to open up new pathways for exploration. And while some have argued that Darwin was (or was not) a racist or alternatively, have excused him on the presumption that all Victorians were, that’s not what interests me here. Instead, a consideration of Victorian meanings of “race,” for example, might point to a slightly different set of implications than those we currently ascribe to Darwin. To insist that such meanings don’t exist or are irrelevant is, to my thinking, to deny that both human language and human science are necessarily, though not exclusively, about humans. It is of a piece with the pervasive patterns of belief that hamper ecological thinking, among these, our sense of what it means to be human.

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Ecological Beings Rethinking how we view ourselves is key to developing an ecological culture. As Val Plumwood insists: What requires philosophical engagement in the context of anthropocentric culture is self rather than other, the limits imposed by the human rather than the nature side of the ethical relationship, the ethical stance of closure rather than the ethical stance of openness. (11)

But how do we attend to the human without reiterating a problematic anthropocentrism? Certainly, we are in the position of the physician who has failed to heal our self, but what might that self (healed or healable) look like? What would it mean to think of ourselves as embedded within an ecology, a constituent part closely connected to others? What would it mean to understand ourselves within an ecosystem, in which these connections imply the exchange of energy it its myriad forms? Or perhaps, embodied as we are, we are ecosystems? And how might rereading ourselves as well as nature help us to believe, as well as know, that we are? Even the most dedicated environmentalism has had a hard time letting go of the sense that we are somehow separate from the so-called environment we inhabit. Cheryll Glotfelty, in her introduction to The Environmental Studies Reader, offers this helpful distinction: …in its connotations, enviro- is anthropocentric and dualistic, implying that we humans are at the center, surrounded by everything that is not us, the environment. Eco-, in contrast, implies interdependent communities, integrated systems, and strong connections among constituent parts. (xx)

Of course, not everyone understands “enviro-” in this way, but the connotations are there, if not always active. In any case, for Glotfelty, as for Plumwood and many others, dualism goes hand in hand with anthropocentrism. The “enviro-” way of distinguishing modern man or the individual or the human from “everything that is not us” seems almost always to place “us” front and/or center. This is, of course, not to say that we should not think of the environment; we need to think about it more than ever. But perhaps it would be useful not to think about it as an environment, or perhaps not only as an environment. Eco-, by Glotfelty’s accounting, opens up a host of alternative perspectives for how we may view the complex relations within our world. It strikes me as significant that

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Glotfelty manages to list the implications of “eco” without any pronouns (at least for the moment). Neither “we” nor “us” appears on this part of the statement above. And yet, she undoubtedly requires “us” to rethink how “we,” perhaps in some new sense, view ourselves. Certainly, literary criticism has been working to rethink how “we” see “ourselves” since at least the 1980s. With the “intersectionality” that has now become familiar, we seek to complicate the oneness as well as the boundedness of the person formerly known as the individual, evoking his/her/their complexity and connecting him/her/them to multiple collectives through various “affinities.”4 Medically, we are increasingly (and often frustratingly) accustomed to thinking of ourselves not so much as single beings but as roughly a dozen different organ systems: anyone who has been bounced from one specialist to another can appreciate some of the downsides of this partitioning. On the other hand, take an antibiotic long enough (or strong enough) to mess with the trillions of bacteria necessary to the proper functioning of a human body, and you will feel in your gut what it means to neglect your own multiplicity. In view of these entanglements of the one and the many, Darwin’s habitual use of the word “being” to signal both the individual and the species seems sensible, suggestive and profound. To think of ourselves as ecosystems—as complexes of interacting organisms or subsystems—may help us to apprehend this kind of being, but this too is not without its hazards. An ecosystem is a complex assemblage of living and nonliving elements, bound in relations of energy exchange. Like any other, however, the term “ecosystem” comes with baggage. It is usually used for things much larger than novels or humans, encompassing the animals, plants, microorganisms, water, minerals, and atmospheric tendencies of a (big) place: a rainforest, a desert, a coral reef, or even a city. “Natural” ecosystems are invested with high moral value and are generally taken to be self-sufficient and balanced, whereas unnatural ecosystems are fraught with the regrettable side effects of human interference. Of course, the problems of distinguishing the natural from the unnatural brings us back to the problematics of “nature” itself. And, as I shall emphasize throughout this book, the ecosystem concept is too often limited by an attached but counter-ecological presumption of closure, which still 4  I first encountered this notion in Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women (149–81).

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dominates our thinking on energy, the nation, the family, and the individual. All of these reinforce what Plumwood calls “the ethical stance of closure,” with which I have struggled for some time in my thinking about energy concepts. It is the hope of this book and one of the most promising affordances of energy to reframe these in the service of a more ecological, more ethical stance of openness, as we rethink ourselves as ecological beings.

Energy and Ecocriticism In the face of the current ecological crisis, ecocritics are putting considerable efforts into figuring out new ways to understand and inhabit the earth. Driven by a sense that how we act depends critically on how we observe and interpret, on how we read, literary scholars are working to identify and develop alternative modes of discourse with which to approach our current ecological crisis, even as we continue to clarify how dominant modes of thought and speech have helped to grow it. And as the nineteenth-­century witnesses the rapid rise of industrial capitalism, global expansion, the turn to fossil fuels, and other ecology-busting trends, as well as the advent of the ecological sciences, scholars of nineteenth-­century literature and culture have been particularly active in this respect. As a complement to the excellent work that investigates the social and cultural changes associated with the shifting use in sources of energy or fuel (Heidi Scott, Allen MacDuffie, and Michael Tondre come immediately to mind), this book considers the nineteenth-century articulation of the physical principles underlying our thinking about energy in all of its forms. This book proffers energy as a concept, a form or structure, a way of thinking about the world, to add to our growing repertoire of more ecological modes of thinking. I believe that a basic understanding of the laws of thermodynamics—enough to make a respectable showing at cocktail parties— is essential to such a repertoire. To that end, Chap. 2 on “Energy, Form, and the Novel,” will provide a short overview of the laws of thermodynamics, with their emphases on the conservation and dissipation of energy, as well as their problematic presumption of closure. The following chapter, “The Physics of Life,” will briefly explore their historical connection to ecology and some of the problems, limitations and potential attached to their common usage, especially as nineteenth-century thinking about energy intersects with Darwinian biology. I believe energy is an especially flexible form, that on the one hand is firmly grounded in some of the most

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enduring natural laws we have managed to articulate, and on the other, suggests far more open, interconnected ways of inhabiting the world. Thus, energy lends itself to the second purpose of this book: to develop experimental practices of reading and thinking as we strive to better understand ourselves as ecological beings. To that end, following a brief chapter on how one might go about such experimentation, I have included my own somewhat quirky, but open, energetic, and ecologically informed readings of four widely read texts, which span the nineteenth century: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Along with the “unperfected recipe” for ecological reading, these are intended to encourage others to experiment similarly. It is my hope that rereading these stories can help us become less broadly centric, as well as less appropriative. Perhaps nature, whether we find it in literature or not, can productively be viewed not merely as an object of study, but as a subject with a life narrative, truly different from ours, but not nearly so separate. Neither projection nor identification will serve—but sympathy and solidarity may. And of course, what happens to us in the trying? I don’t know. I did say it was experimental—but perhaps more like experimental cooking than experimental science. I haven’t got what anyone would properly call a hypothesis to test. Rather, I hope to build on what others have found to work, try some new things, and see what happens. I think this kind of experimental reading is an evolving process: the “recipe” included in Chap. 4 is only a suggestion, something to be going on with. Moreover, my goals are unabashedly inclusive and pedagogical. Please try this at home; in the classroom; in the woods, and wherever you go when you wish to read deliberately.

CHAPTER 2

Energy, Form, and the Novel

The Laws of Thermodynamics Energy physics is one of the most enduring physical theories we have. Developed in bits and bobs through the first half of the nineteenth century, the result of many scientists working independently on apparently disconnected problems, the fundamental principles established by Victorian energy physics have endured for over a century and a half. Reimagined and reframed since they were first articulated, concepts of energy and entropy are currently applied in myriad ways across many areas of science and engineering. But the overwhelming consensus is that the laws of thermodynamics are here to stay. By the mid-twentieth century, energy concepts had become a litmus of scientific literacy, at least for C.P. Snow, as he famously bemoaned the “Two Cultures” divide between the sciences and the humanities. Clearly the life of the party, Snow reports having repeatedly taken down a peg, those “highly educated” people he had heard expressing “with considerable gusto…their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists” (16). What was his irrefutable demand? Repeat the laws of thermodynamics!

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. J. Gold, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68604-8_2

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So that no one reading this book should ever be placed in such an uncomfortable social position, here they are:

These laws are themselves a balancing act. The first law insists that this thing we call “energy” can be neither created nor destroyed. Such creation/destruction, according to many Victorian physicists, belongs to God alone. Nor can we really lose energy; it may seem lost, but it is only transformed. Mechanical energy can turn to heat; potential energy, to motion. With a bit of ingenuity, we can turn stored chemical energy (such as the wood of a tree or the gas in a car) into heat or motion, or even the energy of motion (such as that of a running stream) into electricity. The second law acknowledges that not all energy is equally useful to us, equally orderly, or (in a more mathematical formulation) not all configurations are equally probable. So every time a transformation occurs such that energy changes form, some amount of that energy changes to a less usable form. It is relatively easy to burn firewood; but once the heat generated escapes into the atmosphere, we are unlikely to get it back again. We may derive fuel from fossils, but lots and lots of energy went into forming them: hundreds of millions of years of high temperature and pressure, and that only after a great deal of solar energy was harnessed in the making the plants

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and small animals (rather than the dinosaurs that we often imagine) that are the source of our petroleum, coal and natural gas. Much of that formative energy has long been dissipated as irretrievable heat, and as we make use of fossil fuels, more such goes to join it. Extrapolating forward from the second law, in these and innumerable other scenarios, suggests that eventually, all the energy that exists will be beyond our reach. Entropy is a measure of how far we are along in this process. The increase of entropy is, identically, the passage of time. That is, of course, as long as we are in a closed system. This well-known pre-condition is so widely understood that it frequently lifts right out of the conversation. When we allow it to do so, however, we elide the overwhelming fact that very few of nature’s systems (eco or otherwise) are actually closed. Contrary to the narrative that develops as one advances in basic physics education, open systems described by “non-equilibrium thermodynamics” are rather the rule than the exception. Granted, the math may be more difficult, but the big idea is easy: When we bring energy into whatever we choose to designate as the system from something outside of it, we can stave off the increase of entropy by this import of (often huge amounts of) energy from elsewhere. This borrowing has so much to do with how life works that, like the sun, we may take it for granted. When we do so, when we casually neglect to mention the presumption of closure that underlies the laws of thermodynamics, we proliferate familiar patterns of separation and boundedness. We also may amplify a conceptual problem that attaches to the assertion of universal physical laws. Unfortunately, this universality has often been taken wrongly to imply that all systems involving those laws are fully predictable. This is most emphatically not the case. The fact that energy principles are at work at every scale, from the microscopic to the universal, means that in any given system, energy exchange is at work not only where we can observe it, but also where we cannot. To fully describe the energetic interactions of a given system is impossible. Scientific description will always imply choice. Which factors do we consider? Which do we ignore or approximate? This, as we know well from literary scholarship, is a kind of interpretation, and while it can be expedient to make such choices, identifying them—articulating the (metaphorical or real) lenses through which we observe—is a necessary corrective. Among other things, such transparency reminds us that our truth is part of a larger picture. And while this view may somewhat reshape the nature of scientific authority, it also renders strong scientific consensus—such as that regarding climate

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change—less vulnerable to specious counterexamples. It is in this way that we may reconcile the enduring correctness of the laws of thermodynamics, with the limitations of their formulation. There is no such thing as life in a perfect thermos, but the laws of thermodynamics, so fundamental to our understanding of the physical world, still require us to recall that we are approximating only, that we are leaving things out. It is thus a key project of energetic ecocriticism to enable us to see, or at least acknowledge, the parts of a system and its outside entanglements that we have long taken for granted.

The Forms of Energy This means attending to the largely invisible energy of everyday life. The energy that lights or warms or cools our houses, that stocks the supermarket, that tempts us with an excess of disposable containers, cheaply made clothing, and tech with planned obsolescence, may be similarly invisible. As Heidi Scott puts it, in her excellent and capacious book Fuel: “We live in an era in which fuel is ubiquitous in our lives, but our experience of it is largely immaterial” (Fuel 13). To truly see every energy exchange that supports our lifestyle may be impossible, and the consumer who must know all will likely be paralyzed with indecision. But to attend to the patterns by which our culture has been shaped by the use of fossil fuels can still make a practical difference. Literary scholars are thus at work to uncover the innumerable ways in which the move from animal energies and the burning of wood to the widespread use of coal and then petroleum has shaped our culture, to “place the Anthropocene consumer in an enlightened history of evolving energy regimes” (Scott, Fuel 43). As the nineteenth century witnessed a huge acceleration in our use of fossil fuels, Victorian scholars have been especially concerned with the roots of our current energy culture. Tapping the literature of coal and petroleum, Allen MacDuffie, Michael Tondre, along with Heidi Scott, have explored the culture that enables resource depletion, even as others such as Vybarr Cregan-Reid have considered its effects on our bodies and Jesse Oak Taylor, on our skies. As a complement to these very important studies circulating around shifts in dominant sources of energy, I propose to revisit the roots of our scientific and cultural uses of the concept(s) of energy, especially the laws of thermodynamics. In the midst of our current global crises, it is abundantly clear that we need a better, broader understanding of what may seem highly abstract scientific principles. And indeed, these

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bear heavily not only on our willingness to vaccinate our children or to acknowledge climate change, but also on our most basic conceptions of ourselves and our relations to others. Energy is on the one hand a quantifiable property of matter, and on the other, a quality imbued with social and moral significance. I therefore propose to rethink energy in terms of its forms, both material and conceptual. I am, of course, thinking of Caroline Levine’s recent book Forms, in which she proposes a broad interpretation of “form” that encompasses “all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference” (3). Energy is such an ordering principle—a pattern of repetition and difference that organizes the material world and our thinking about it. Indeed, at the risk of profundity, I would suggest that energy physics itself is an ongoing, widespread meditation on form itself, and its many possibilities or affordances. A “physical theory” rather than an abstract science,1 energy physics is built from the ground up, from the observations of many observers over a long period of time, among them engineers, experimental scientists, and poets. The concept emerges from the study of many material forms—such as water, ice, and steam (and these are just the physical forms assumed by a single chemical). The transfer of energy derives from and enables such changes in material form. Light, heat, gravitational potential, chemical combustibility, motion: these are material forms that energy can take as it moves through its lifetime of exchanges and transformations. Energy itself is thus a kind of umbrella form based on its primary feature or affordance: what all these forms of energy have in common is their capacity to do work, which is itself a form of energy—on the one hand, a “rich, dense, meaty and sometimes suffering human signifier” and on the other, the more abstract exertion of a force over a distance (Johnson 65). Developed during a period of vast imperial expansion and rapid industrialization, our ideas about energy are implicated in these histories and have facilitated the largely unchecked growth that followed. This is by no means to say that they are wrong. But our thinking about energy has emphasized some aspects or affordances of energy and minimized others. Conservation, entropy, closure and even universality have dominated our 1  For the Victorian physicist Rankine, this growth from the widespread observation of distinct phenomena is what distinguishes a physical theory, such as energetics, from an abstract science, such as Newtonian mechanics. The principles of a physical theory are derived from the analogies found across these myriad phenomena. See ThermoPoetics (47).

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thinking (more on these below), but under different circumstances, this could have been otherwise. To revisit the forms of energy reveals many of the affordances we may hope to find in more “open ecologies”—including emphases on work, connectedness, and transformation. Work is energy’s definitional affordance: the energy of an object or system is its capacity to do work. Merely to recall this connection is to evoke the changes from physical labor dependent on biomass energy to our current ease, which depends on so much more energy. And to obscure the dependence of some forms of energy (food, fuel, and whatever else conduces to leisure) on others, especially work, is to enable a host of social inequities, among humans or between humans and animals.2 We may also emphasize transformability as a central principle of energetic relations. After all, articulating energy required a host of revelations about how this becomes that under such and such a process or circumstance. Consider: as a rock rolls down a hill, energy in one form (gravitational potential, weight times height) becomes another (the energy of motion or kinetic energy, half of the mass times the square of the velocity), and as it rolls to a stop creates another (thermal energy), which we can measure in the slight changes in temperature of both the rock and the ground on which it rolls. Eventually rock and ground will cool back down as, in the form of heat, thermal energy dissipates into the earth and the atmosphere. Neither height nor velocity nor heat is energy per se, but rather its configuration at the moment we choose to stop and observe. What’s more, the story extends forever into the past and the future. How does the stone get to the top of the hill in the first place? Energy in some form or another was involved in getting it there. What happens to the heat that dissipates into the atmosphere? Well, we have an increasing sense of that, don’t we? And so on. As much or more than the presumption of closure that underscores the laws of thermodynamics , energy emphasizes connectedness, likeness in difference, and the entanglement of everything. It does so, moreover, in a way that literalizes the likeness among things: heat is not only like light, at the level of energy, it is another form of what light is or what light could become: likeness plus time. Thus, though fully implicated in a history preoccupied with closed systems, energy provides alternative models. Perhaps most importantly to 2  For a fascinating discussion of the abstraction of work into a standard measure that makes no distinction between the labor of machines and that of living bodies, see Bob Jonson’s chapter on “Energy Slaves” in Mineral Rites.

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our work here, it has the potential to serve as an intuitive figure for conceptually opening the systems thus conceived as closed. To do so, moreover, is consistent with the broadest scientific consensus about some of the most generally applicable natural laws. And though largely overlooked in ecocriticism, I believe that revisiting energy as a form can help us to develop more ecological ways of thinking and being in the world.

Closed Systems, Open Ecologies The close association between energy physics and ecological science has also long been acknowledged—at least since the 1930s, when Arthur Tansley first coined the term “ecosystem.” Tansley, the first president of the British Ecological Society, describes ecosystems theory as the study of “all relations among organisms…in terms of purely material exchange of energy and of such chemical substances as water, phosphorus, nitrogen, and other nutrients (qtd. in Parham GMH emphasis mine). As we shall see in the next chapter, Victorian pioneers of the emerging science of energy saw the importance of energy concepts to living systems considerably earlier—even before they had settled on “energy” as the favored term with which to describe the central concern of their science. It also happens that notions about ecosystems retain our predilection for closure. We may imagine them as isolable, but even the largest and most apparently self-sufficient and “untouched” of these systems is entangled with all of the others. Certainly since Columbus sailed the ocean blue and probably long before, ecosystems have been radically changed by the movement of humans and their baggage. Planting crops, burning (or failing to burn) forests, hunting wolves and beavers, damming or undamming running water, carrying disease, dumping barrels of dirt formerly used as ballast or simply tracking it around on their shoes—intentionally and unconsciously, humans have always affected the ecosystems they enter. So do other animals; the introduction of a single animal may mean the introduction of thousands of species to a given ecosystem.3 This also holds for plants, though their mobility is of course more limited. And while there is no doubt that the anthropocene has seen devastating changes to the planet’s living species, it is nonetheless remarkable hubris of humanity to suggest that we are the only species ever to have changed the earth’s 3  See for example Daniel Botkin’s discussion of the “species area curve” and a single buffalo, in 25 Myths (132).

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climate on a global scale. Indeed, our very being depends on the history of these changes, beginning with the most ancient bacteria, whose ability to photosynthesize sunlight and to release oxygen (toxic waste, from the bacteria’s point of view) into the atmosphere made it possible for multicellular life to evolve (Botkin 25M 2). Acknowledging this interdependence helps us to reconceive our sense of ourselves, and our relations to the ecosystem with which we interact, but which is not fully ours to control or even sustain. Like the individual and the nation, the more we think about an ecosystem, the less “self-sufficient” it appears. Even the earth is not self-­sufficient. Although, in this post-fission age, we worry far less than the Victorians did about the sun going out, our global dependence on this huge energy source deserves a nod. It is at once absolutely obvious and very easy to ignore. But it underscores the impossibility of isolating any ecosystem, which cannot survive if closed. It requires an energy source or decay is inevitable. Nonetheless, the presumption of the closed system has fostered almost two centuries of extremely useful physics; the model of closed ecosystems, even the partially closed microcosm,4 has done much to foster our ongoing understanding of how ecosystems work. Similarly, the presumption of closure, of preexisting bounded units, has enabled remarkable accomplishments in biology (more below). Such patterns are undoubtedly useful, but they are only part of the story. Non-equilibrium thermodynamics seeks to address the limitations of classical thermodynamics,5 not least the presumption of closure and associated ways systems change over time. Of course, the impulse to put boundaries around things is by no means limited to the sciences, but science has done a good deal to foster our sense that things are separable, isolable, and stable. The presumption of closure that frames the laws of thermodynamics reflects and reinforces a 4  For more on the microcosm as it pertains to ecology and nineteenth-century literature, see Heidi Scott, Chaos and Cosmos. 5  I use this term throughout to signal the originary forms of thermodynamics as established in the mid- nineteenth century and articulated most concisely by Rudolf Clausius in 1865 to include the two laws of thermodynamics with which this chapter begins and the presumption of closure that underscores them. The term “classical thermodynamics” is also used now to signal a broader and more elaborated study of near-equilibrium, macroscopic systems; this “classical mechanics” lays claim to as many as four laws of thermodynamics, and makes abundant use of the ideal gas law as well as of later developments, such as Maxwell’s equations and the statistical interpretation of thermodynamics.

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culture that perceives genes, cells, individuals, species and nations, and with them novels, as bounded actors operating within, but dissociable from, an environment. As Donna Haraway argues, an actor-in-an-­ environment model still proliferates within biology on many scales; this biology, she suggests, is “made of preexisting bounded units (genes, cells, organisms, etc.) in interactions that can only be conceived of as competitive or cooperative” (60). Even traditional notions of objectivity presume clear distinctions between subject and object, the isolation of the active human observer and the relatively passive, usually non-human, observed. This it/not-it structure controls signification; it works like scientific language “to exclude, or suppress, feasible meanings” (Beer OF 156)—to put boundaries around things. And it continues to dominate the reputation and expectations of science and indeed, of nature as-it-is in both science and culture more broadly. This is not all bad. As is clear from the last few centuries of robust science, the impulse to put boundaries and things can be a quite useful model for studying nature. It serves Darwin well to know where the cabbage ends and the soil begins (see Prologue), but this cabbage-in-an-­ environment model is not the only way to think about the cabbage-soil entanglement. Of course, the best scientists are generally the first to insist that we really know very little. And to conflate even our robust models with nature-as-it-is may be to foreclose other ways of understanding. Some such ways of understanding have come from science itself: quantum mechanics and relativity come to mind, as both insist that what is observed is inextricably entangled with the observer. Even before modern physics, nineteenth-century science, philosophy, and literature developed numerous alternatives to the “preexisting bounded units” structure that dominates western thinking. The contributors to Victorian Literature & Culture special issue “Open Ecologies” thus seek a “more mutable notion of ecology” that does not, like organicist or holistic versions, assume that the interaction between constituent parts are “coherent, harmonious, or tightly integrated” or function in service of the greater whole (G&K 3). They find models for these in Victorian thinking on epigenesis,6 in studies of fungal life, in urban planning and non-fiction memoir, in a tradition of 6  “The theory of epigenesis (which [George Henry] Lewes attributes to the eighteenthcentury physiologist Caspar Friedrich Wolff) argues that development of living bodies is coordinated by a cascading series of influences, encounters between the developing body and its environment” (Griffiths “Marner” 308).

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multispecies storytelling, in poetry and the novel, and in the parasite and the symbiont.7 Among these contributors, Jeanette Samyn argues that the notion of symbiosis, from its inception in the nineteenth century, along with its older and messier companion-concept of parasitism, has always troubled the notion of bounded individuality: The concept of symbiosis originated in the nineteenth century precisely as a way of understanding complex biological relationships in which it was often difficult to distinguish where one organism ended and another began; from the start, symbionts troubled biological conventions, prompting questions about the nature of biological individuality, dependence and interdependence, kingdom and species, and the relationship between parts and wholes as well as acting as models for human social life. (243–4)

Symbiosis thus speaks to the needs of “open ecologies,” not only in its insistence on the interdependence of (all) systems, but in troubling dominant models of closure on multiple scales. But Samyn’s essay warms my heart most when she gestures to an inescapable thermodynamic fact: “there are no closed forms. Life, on the smallest and largest scales, is symbiotic” (257). Similarly, ecosystems theory asserts in its most fundamental premise, that all forms are entangled through relations of energy exchange. Energy itself underlies all interactions, at every scale. We will return to this at length. Meanwhile, Samyn also observes that symbiosis “represents for many contemporary scholars a way out of bounded individualism and anthropocentric hubris” (261). As we work to rethink our ways of inhabiting the earth, it may help to think of ourselves as thus unbounded, as symbionts or parasites. Indeed, for Darwin, parasites exemplify “all creatures who struggle to exist in changing, competitive environments” (Samyn 250)—which is to say, all creatures. Darwin thus suggests, to 7  This issue gathers essays by scholars who turn “to the nineteenth century in order to weigh the legacy of its holistic conception of systems and to resurrect alternative discourses of openness, permeability, and indeterminate relation” (1). Like Haraway, the editors of this volume, Devin Griffiths and Deanna Kreisel, point to the idealized biological cell as a system we presume closed to our detriment. Fascinated by their apparent “self-maintenance, closure, and replicability,” we risk neglecting the ways that “all systems are dependent upon and exquisitely sensitive to their wider conditions” including their histories (15–16). This “autopoietic [self-creating] conceptualization of life” contrasts not only with “allopoietic” systems, like factories, but also fosters an impossible sense of what “sustainability” can mean.

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evoke another of Donna Haraway’s memorable phrases, that we are all parasites.8 Although I have a feeling that getting in touch with our inner parasite might be a hard sell, we will certainly try when we come to Jane Eyre. Meanwhile we can try to think of ourselves broadly as complexes of interacting organisms or subsystems—as ecosystems. This too is not without its hazards. Like any other, the term ecosystem comes with baggage. It is usually used for things much larger than novels or humans, encompassing the animals, plants, microorganisms, water, minerals, and atmospheric tendencies of a (big) place: a rainforest, a desert, a coral reef, or even a city. “Natural” ecosystems are invested with high moral value and are generally taken to be self-sufficient and balanced, whereas “unnatural” ecosystems (urban ecosystems, for example) are fraught with the regrettable side effects of human interference. Said otherwise, the notion of “natural” ecosystems can reinforce our fixation on closure, even autopoiesis, figuring humans as well as nature as separable, bound, and potentially independent systems. Nonetheless, in the search for what Timothy Morton calls “ecology without nature,” ecosystems have the potential to heighten our sense that the boundaries between the human and the natural, like all other boundaries, are at once permeable, provisional, and transitory. Further, ecosystems not only stress interdependence between systems, they also suggest multiplicity within whatever is provisionally designated as the system. And finally, as the ecosystem was conceived as a complex assemblage of living and nonliving elements, bound in relations of energy exchange, the concept joins physics and biology as ecological sciences. In Chap. 3, we will explore some of the ups and downs of this sometimes-tenuous collaboration, during the nineteenth century, before the ecosystem concept is established. This moment has shaped our subsequent understandings and deployment of energy concepts. But for all that, the legacy of the nineteenth-century inception of thermodynamics bequeaths a tendency to imagine energy at work in carefully articulated bound systems. But energy connects rather than separates those systems in chains of energy exchange leading back to the big bang. We will explore the nineteenth-century origins of this predilection for energetic closure throughout this book, 8  I am thinking of course of “The Cyborg Manifesto” reprinted in Simians, Cyborgs and Women. Though often re-quoted as “We are all cyborgs,” what Haraway actually says is “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs” (150).

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even as we work to reimagine the imaginative systems it sustains. Meanwhile, we turn to some other key players in establishing and querying our sense of ourselves as preexisting bounded units.

The Individual Many have expressed the need for rethinking the human individual as both interdependent and multiple. As I have suggested in the Prologue, we have a growing repertoire of ways to understand ourselves as multiple: intersectional identities, a collection of organ systems, a home for bacteria. The ecosystem and the symbiont join these in suggesting the interdependence of all such systems—internal and external. But we still have a good deal of work to do to unseat that most familiar of “pre-existing bounded unit(s),” the individual, along with the bounded units he inhabits, among them the family, the nation, and the species. The individual is among the most important and, from an ecological point of view, one of the most troubling of the many naturalized closed systems to which the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries give rise. Science has played a large part in developing a human self-conception that places us at once apart from, and at the center of things. As Donna Haraway has compellingly argued, western science has done much to distinguish the human from the rest of the natural world: Biological sciences have been especially potent in fermenting notions about all the mortal inhabitants of this earth since the imperializing eighteenth century. Homo sapiens—the Human as species, the Anthropos as the human species, Modern Man—was the chief product of these knowledge practices. (30)

The potency of biology in spreading such notions derives from our willingness, since the Enlightenment, to invest science with the authority to depict nature as it is. And while science is actually quite good at such depictions, we need also to consider its limitations. “Modern Man,” Haraway explains, is a figure characterized by “human exceptionalism and bounded individualism” (30), notions proliferated in science and politics for some 300 years, and in religion and literature for many more. Human exceptionalism, the notion that humans are fundamentally different from all other species, comes to us in numerous forms, from diverse directions. It frequently takes the form of the religious belief that man (and only man)

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was created in God’s image. It also figures within the more secular notion that humans are the sole possessors of language and culture. The traditional scientific placement of homo sapiens, sapiens not only in a species, but also in a genus of our own, reflects and perpetuates another form of human exceptionalism. In all cases, the human is presumed to be clearly distinct and largely in control (if not fully independent) of the rest of nature. “Bounded individualism” similarly distinguishes the individual from his surroundings, with which he (generally, it is he) interacts. This notion of “boundedness” dovetails with what we have called, in connection with thermodynamics, our predilection for closed systems. The bounded individual is such a system. This individual is, moreover, closely connected to “anthropocentrism,” a conceptual framework that places the human at the center of his environment. “Anthropocentrism” implies that humans inhabit a closed system as well, since open systems don’t have centers. But even if we read the “centric” figuratively, not as centering so much as emphasizing the importance of the human in comparison to all else that inhabits that environment, both “bounded individualism” and “anthropocentrism” figure the single human and the species as systemically distinct from and separable from the “environments” that surround them. Whether individually or in the aggregate, we are thought to act separately and independently from what we call “nature.” Providing an actor-in-environment model par excellence, literature seems to reinforce this anthropocentric self-conception. Apparently dominated by a man versus structure that we were once taught was the basis of all stories, the novel in particular seems to place the individual—self-­ contained, unique, and struggling—at the center of all good plots. Man v. man. Man v. society. Man v. nature. Man v. God. Man v. himself. Like the “preexisting bounded units (genes, cells, organisms, etc)” that dominate biological thinking, literary Man figures in “interactions that can only be conceived of as competitive or cooperative” (Haraway 60). This novelistic individual and “Modern Man” reinforce each other through shared history and shared structure, spreading anthropocentrism throughout our thinking. And the notion of the individual is so closely tied to our supposedly self-evident inalienable rights, that it is hard to imagine our sense of self taking any other shape. It seems only natural. As Nancy Armstrong argues in How Novels Think, this conception develops in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in close collaboration with the subject of the novel. Armstrong argues that the history of the

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novel is the history of the modern individual. She tracks the rise of the novel through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a wrangling between the evolving concept of the individual and the perceived needs of the collective, whether species, state or family. The more the novel features at its center such a desiring individual, the more it enacts the need to contain those desires, lest they threaten the whole. Otherwise, “the desire for self-expansion” evident in early works from Crusoe to the self-expressive Romantic individual, “would simply expand desire.” The notion of individual desire is thus accompanied by a fear that can be “assuaged only by mechanisms of self-enclosure” (34)—those things we imagine will keep the desiring individual in check. The Victorians double down on this need for containment: “Where eighteenth-century heroines…stretched the limits of self-expression…their Victorian counterparts contracted those limits so as to transform individualistic energy in forms of self-management and containment” (Armstrong 79). The rhetorical pattern Armstrong identifies throughout the nineteenth-­century novel reflects the ongoing ambivalence of a culture that sees itself (or wants to see itself) as made up of self-enclosed individuals. Out of all this wrangling, the modern subject emerges—a self-­ contained individual whose very desires at once serve and separate her/ him/them from the collective. Indeed, the capacity for such containment generally determines, though not always in the same way, the degree of humanity ascribed to any individual. This view of the contained human (individual) separates us not only from other humans, but from all that surrounds us. Such self-conception serves as the frequently unexamined premise upon which we base our conceptions of nature. Outside of us, nature figures as setting, resource, obverse, and opposition. This notion of the individual also grounds what I will call the “hero” story, following Ursula Le Guin’s delightful essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” The novel, she says, is a very unheroic kind of tale, but the hero has a tendency to take it over in ways that tend to suppress alternative, potentially more ecological ways of reading. We shall revisit the problematics of the feminist hero when we come to Jane Eyre. Meanwhile, we can see the troubling effects of our focus on the heroic individual by turning briefly to Dreamworks’ Bee Movie. A computer-animated comedy starring the voice of Jerry Seinfeld as Barry the Bee, this is as heroic a story as you can find and, moreover, precisely stages the sleight of hand through which ecology is subordinated to the individual. For, Barry teams up with a human florist (Renée Zellweger) in a campaign against five major

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corporations stealing honey rightfully belonging to the bees. When the campaign succeeds and the court rules in favor of the bees’ suit, we seem to come to a solution that indicts the corporations for their unprincipled appropriation of natural resources—a story to make Rachel Maddow proud9 But as the movie goes on, it undermines this conclusion, suggesting that this interference has upset the so-called balance of nature: bees grow lazy from the surplus of honey and flowers start to die everywhere, until a timely intervention involving the Rose Parade allows the bees to pollinate the world’s flowers. This restoration of the status quo seems to justify, even naturalize, the workings of big business—hitherto represented by the villainously superabundant Layton T.  Montgomery (John Goodman). But this is Dreamworks, and so here’s the requisite happy ending: Barry is promoted from worker bee to Pollen Jock (!), with all of the celebrity and freedom of movement that entails.10 Thus, the story of the individual supersedes that of the ecology, suggesting that we should by all means try to get ahead, but we really shouldn’t mess with the system. Still, like the monsters in pulp science fiction, the ecological story is there, even if it doesn’t survive to the end. It is also, like these monsters, perceived as a threat to the individual and the system as is. So too with the novelistic individual, which is subject to ongoing threats to its containment. These manifest in novels in numerous ways, ranging from the excess sensibility often associated with what Nathaniel Hawthorne dubbed “scribbling women” writers, to the monstrosity that, like Dracula, is “capable of transforming the individual from a self-governing citizen into an instrument of group desire” (Armstrong 25). For all that novels are believed to cultivate sympathy and empathy,11 they reveal that even in these forms, connectivity to other beings threaten the self-contained individual, as does the potentially engulfing collective itself. Burdened with a sense of the mutual threat of individuality and the collective, western culture pursues a pattern of narrative consolidation and abjection. The Berthas—the unruly female, the animal within and 9  Rachel Maddow’s Blowout tracks the ecological and political destruction wrought by “the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth”—big oil and gas. 10  I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for the observation that these would be better named “Pollen Jills.” That Barry and his worker friend Adam (Matthew Broderick) are coded male, is thus revealed to be a moment of pathetic fallacy, not only imposing societal gender expectations onto bees but patently obscuring the real work of female bodies—both human and bee. 11  I am indebted to my colleague Katarina Gephardt for highlighting this irony.

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without, the cultural and racial other, the physical body and its messy desires—are vilified, rejected, or destroyed. The self-contained Janes, who keep these unruly forces well under control, are allowed to persist. The troubles fostered by these patterns of consolidation and abjection are many, varied and familiar. As the philosopher Val Plumwood puts it in her Environmental Culture, “It is not only women that have been constructed as oppositional to western rationality, culture, and philosophy, but also the slave, the animal, and the barbarian, all associated with the body and the whole contrasted sphere of physicality and materiality” (19). Most important for our purposes here, and most like the bait and switch that celebrates Barry’s promotion to pollen jock, such stories may prevent our seeing ourselves as embedded, embodied, ecological beings (Plumwood 19).

Closure as Novelistic Form Seeing past the individual is but one way of resisting the problem of the closed system that permeates our thinking. On another scale, we must address the framework of closure that dominates and draws life from the novel. As I have argued elsewhere regarding the elegy,12 the novel partakes of multiple structures of classical thermodynamics.13 And novelistic closure is no exception. It balances the forward drive of the second law with the containment implied in the first. As Tina Choi argues, “the hypothetical universe imagined” by the Victorian novel was a linear one, “like the thermodynamic universe … implicitly, inexorably moving towards some final point of resolution, while at the same time reassuring readers of its desire for containment and its ability to encompass all of its elements into a single, sweeping plot of transformation and recovery” (307). Closure in both physics and novels has a consolatory function. It suggests that things may change, but they will not be lost. The desire for closure manifests as the sense that all of the details are working toward some common, greater end. No matter how disparate, even messy, or contradictory things may seem, it all comes together—though we may require the critic to show us how. Literary critics have long been preoccupied with the question of closure in the novel, but “closure” manifests in different ways. The wholeness of  See “Tennyson’s Thermodynamic Solution” in ThermoPoetics.  In the chapter on ThermoPoetics on Bleak House, for example, I explore the ways the novel functions as a heat engine, with sources and sinks that drive the flow of energy. 12 13

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the “single, sweeping plot” evokes what the New Critics of the mid-­ twentieth century identify as “unity” in the work of art. This “unity” thus implies a kind of logical coherence, harmony, and perhaps above all, self-­ containment. It is a key feature of what Cleanth Brooks, alluding to Keats’s famous ode, dubbed “the well-wrought urn.” Readers of novels in particular tend to associate closure with the story’s end, which is supposed to wrap things up neatly. Many add that the ending ought to be happy. Charles Darwin, for one, records liking all novels, if they are “moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed” (Life and Letters). Oscar Wilde is more cynical, as his dubitable Miss Prism remarks, “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means” (Earnest Act 2). For some, this tendency toward happy endings doesn’t seem very artistic. As Henry James observes in “The Art of Fiction,” “the ‘ending’ of a novel is, for many persons, like that of a good dinner, a course of dessert and ices, and the artist in fiction is regarded as a sort of meddlesome doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes” (3). Art or otherwise, we know what it is to expect closure in a novel: happy or not, the ending makes sense of things. The big questions are answered. No threads are left dangling. We know where and how the major characters end up. And in retrospect, any surprises are sufficiently motivated by what comes before. For Henry James, this closure creates a kind of organic coherence: “A novel,” he says, “is a living thing, all one and continuous, like every other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts” (6). If the term had been available to him, perhaps Henry James would have called it an ecosystem, since it so clearly manifests the “interdependent communities, integrated systems, and strong connections among constituent parts” (Glotfelty xx) so central to ecological thinking. But connectedness need not imply wholism. As I have begun to suggest above, it is a mistake to imagine ecosystems in general as closed. And, according to James, the novel’s apparent completeness is exactly where it diverges from the fidelity to life he finds essential to good fiction. In a definition that resonates with Timothy Morton’s “ecological thought,” James argues that “experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue” (5). Unlimited experience, however, proves rather difficult to squeeze into a novel—even a long Victorian one. As John MacNeill Miller argues in his

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essay on multi-species storytelling, closure in the novel is at once compelling, troubling, and illusory: Some forms of closure proved so practical—and so necessary to developing a coherent ethical vision within the confines of the novel—that they became de rigueur. Chief among these conventional forms of closure was a tendency to ignore almost all material relations that suggested that interdependency and ethical community might transcend the species barrier—a habit of exclusion that saved novelists the trouble (and terror) of facing the extent of ecological openness and of deciding how to respond to it. (58)

The conventional suppression of “material relations” has serious consequences for how we understand not only our relations to other species, but also to each other, to the earth and the sun and the laws of physics. To start to remedy some of the more troubling of these relations requires that we reimagine the apparent completeness of our novels and our knowledge. Indeed, many critics of the last 50–70 years have insisted that a novelistic or poetic system can never be closed, that there is no urn so well-wrought that we can’t find the cracks. Moreover, like John Legend, we have come to love all these perfect imperfections. Perhaps, then, this de-fetishization of closure is something that the humanities has to offer. Perhaps a more ecological reading practice can help address, even break away from, some of the assumptions of closure—and separation and singularity and centrality—that limit our thinking and foment our fears.

Reading with Energy It won’t be easy. As Miller suggests in the excerpt above, some of our most cherished structures are manifestations of the drive to closure: not only the novel, but also the family, the individual, the nation, the species or the planet, the organism, the system, the thing itself. In revisiting the novels that form the focus of chapters to come, we will see however, that the novelistic creation of closure in any/all such systems reveals the impossibility of the closure fantasy itself. In each, we see a struggle to close a system that refuses such containment. Thus, like Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature, and like countless works of literary scholarship including a growing number concerned with ecology, this book “is inspired by the way in which deconstruction searches out, with ruthless and brilliant intensity, points of contradiction and deep hesitation in systems of

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meaning” (6). Each reading foregrounds a different system that the novel struggles without success to close: the family in Mansfield Park, the individual in Jane Eyre, the nation in Great Expectations, and the planet and species in The War of the Worlds. Each purportedly closed system, as we shall see, not only reveals its dependence on, but also operates as synecdoche for the others, from which it cannot be disentangled in thought or fact. And each novel converses with “energy” whose advent as a physical concept is framed by their publication—that is, this book considers two novels that precede the consolidation of the principles of energy physics and the laws of thermodynamics, and two that follow it. These readings thus suggest how the history of energy is situated within a wider drive to closure, even as the concept of energy (in fine, deconstructionist fashion) suggests more open models for thinking systems.

CHAPTER 3

The Physics of Life: Darwin, Thomson, Joule, Boltzmann

In Chap. 2, I have suggested how both science and the novel participate in a larger cultural pattern—an overwhelming tendency to imagine its systems, from the smallest biological cell through the individual, the family, the nation, and humanity as closed. In the second half of this book, we will explore how the nineteenth-century novel both reinforces and queries this presumption of closure, especially through its discourses of energy. Even as the principles of thermodynamics and their underlying presumption of closure are being articulated, novelistic closure draws on and proliferates these same presumptions in ways entangled with increasingly thermodynamic notions of resources, usefulness, and waste. Figures such as Bertha Rochester and Abel Magwitch threaten the illusions of closure in the family and the nation, even as Jane Eyre represents a threat to the organic unity, the nominal harmony of the Reed household. Novelistic closure is achieved only through their expulsion or their incorporation, either of which fosters our developing conception of the independent individual. Our fantasies about this individual, as with Barry the Bee (see Chap. 2), may be a bar to more ecological ways of thinking. Working to develop experimental ways of reading that reconceive the system—its nominal closure, its boundaries and its centers, the relations among its constituents, its entanglements with other systems, and the verbal strategies we use to make sense of it—we will attempt to revisit familiar things with new eyes.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. J. Gold, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68604-8_3

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We will focus especially on the possibilities that the novel’s dominant narrative or our habitual reading practices may foreclose. In the same spirit, and to facilitate these re-readings, we will revisit energy science with a view to highlighting some of its under-sung implications for alternative ways of thinking the world. Although Darwin looms large in our reflections on the nineteenth-century roots of modern ecology, Victorian physicists engaged similarly with concerns we now recognize as ecological. They did so, moreover, in ways that might have nipped in the bud certain ecology-breaking mythologies that seep into even Darwin’s capacious worldview. Had the two sciences resolved their differences earlier, perhaps the limitations of thermodynamics, especially the notion that energy cannot be created, could have acted as a check to the Darwinistic equation of success with progress and indefinite growth. On the other hand, an earlier embrace of entanglement—as vividly depicted in Darwin’s famous image of the “entangled bank” at the end of the Origin of Species (303)—might have redirected our attention to the more open implications of energy physics. And so we will revisit some of the early relations between these two nascent ecological sciences—not only their most public differences, but also the gestures practitioners of one made, or failed to make, into the apparent purview of the other. In doing so, we will see that scientific discourse is itself an act of, and subject to, interpretation. Like reading a novel, we find that what science means, how it produces our view of the world, depends on the perspectives we bring to it, what we emphasize, what we minimize or exclude, and what nominally “outside” information we bring to bear on our readings.

Resolvable Differences Once upon a time, in the mid-nineteenth century, there were two nascent sciences: evolutionary biology and the science of energy. Like Darcy and Elizabeth, they seemed at first to have irreconcilable differences. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they met, conversed, agreed, and disagreed. And for some time, they failed to see the best in each other. In retrospect, it is quite clear that energy physics is—or should be or should have long been—key to ecological thinking. But the long and stormy courtship between energy and evolution has had some lasting effects on how we think about ourselves as ecological beings. By the 1930s, when the first president of the British Ecological Society,

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Arthur Tansley, joined them together under the rubric of ecosystems theory, considerable damage had already been done. The apparent scientific incompatibility between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the principles of energy science were resolved with the advent of radiation theory at the turn of the twentieth century. Until then, however, William Thomson and other physicists were among the most vehement scientific voices to oppose Darwin’s theory. Early thermodynamic calculations of the age of the sun could not accommodate the slow and uncertain process of evolution by natural selection. In one of his best-known essays, “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat” (1862), William Thomson takes issue with Darwin’s means of estimating the age of the earth. In the Origin, Darwin speculates “on the lapse of time, as inferred from the rate of deposition and extent of denudation”—that is, from geological principles regarding how much sediment is deposited and how much the earth has been eroded. Directing our attention to the “the great lines of escarpment in the Wealden district,” Darwin explains that these have been formed predominantly by such “subaerial agencies” as the chemical actions of air and rainwater, which, acting even more slowly on rocks than on the land around them, have thereby formed their characteristic projecting lines of rock (Origin 180). Thomson, in turn, is incredulous: “What then are we to think of such geological estimates as 300,000,000 years for the ‘denudation of the Weald?’” (“Age” 391–2). It is far more probable, he implies through heavy irony, that we owe the chalk cliffs to the violence of a stormy sea, rather than to the slow action of Darwin’s “subaerial agencies.” In turn, Thomson’s objections add to Darwin’s characteristic anxiety. By 1869, Darwin reports that “Thomson’s views of the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.” And later, Darwin expresses a wish that he could respond to critiques of his theories using evidence of “pre-silurian times,” except that he is haunted by the thought of “Sir W. Thomson [who comes] like an odious spectre,”1 to undermine our confidence that the earth’s climate was then much like it is now. Science, though it had been the primary arbiter of real nature since the enlightenment, was giving off some rather mixed signals…and mixed vibes. If Thomson finds Darwin’s estimates of the age of the earth optimistic, he also anticipates an enduring affective difference between thermodynamic and evolutionary discourse. As I have discussed elsewhere, 1

 Letters to A.R. Wallace April 14, 1869 and July 12 [1871] in Life and Letters II.

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evolutionary theory was, by the latter half of the nineteenth century, widely invested with optimism, with ideas of progress and the possibilities of perfection.2 By contrast, thermodynamics, especially the law of entropy, which predicted inevitable and irreversible decay, seemed a bit of a bummer. And certainly, the more depressing implications of thermodynamics are the most familiar in literature. After all, who can forget Dickens’s entropically prescient opening to Bleak House, wherein we are showered with “flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun” (I). The notion to which Dickens alludes, that the sun must eventually burn out, entered the Victorian cultural mythology rapidly and in large part overshadowed other implications of thermodynamics.3 In spite of these differences in interpretation, the two sciences had a good deal in common, which their apparent incompatibility tended to mask. In fact, Darwin’s narratives of evolution by natural selection and the narratives leading to the consolidation of the laws of thermodynamics shared not only an eighteenth-century inheritance, but also a nineteenth-­ century zeitgeist. Both drew upon eighteenth-century notions of a mechanical universe and upon the language of natural theology. And both emerged from the same context of cultural change, imperial expansion, class mobility, and burgeoning industry. Both wrestled with the implications of waste and resource depletion. Both provided a surfeit of fodder for metaphorical re-deployment. And both worked within the same overarching principle regarding the universality of natural laws. As it happens, the tensions between these two nascent ecological sciences depended critically on different interpretations of a shared underlying principle. The doctrine of uniformity maintains that the natural laws and processes that we currently observe at work are the same ones that have always and everywhere governed the universe. And in spite of their differences, Thomson and Darwin both held to this principle. Paradoxically, their disagreement springs from this shared devotion to uniformity. But they interpret it differently. Darwin, as is widely known, rests much of his thinking on principles of uniformitarianism, especially as articulated in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33), which the young Darwin read during his voyage on the Beagle. Darwin therefore presumes that  See ThermoPoetics on Tennyson.  See Gillian Beer’s chapter “‘The Death of the Sun’: Victorian Solar Physics and Solar Theory” in Open Fields. 2 3

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such things as the slow erosion of land and the small changes from parent to offspring can accumulate over time to create the spaces and species with which we are familiar. Darwin’s emphasis is therefore on uniformity of natural processes over time; things must have worked then as they do now. William Thomson shares this presumption of uniformity in natural laws but uses them to refute Darwin’s hypothesis. His emphasis is on the uniformity of natural processes across space. He reasons that matter on the sun must work the same way that matter does in the lab; things must work there as they do here. To believe Darwin, we would have to suppose …that the physical conditions of the sun’s matter differ 1000 times more than dynamics compel us to suppose they differ from those of matter in our laboratory; or [else suppose] that a stormy sea, with possibly channel tides of extreme violence, should encroach on a chalk cliff 1,000 times more rapidly than Mr. Darwin’s estimate of one inch per century. (“Age” 391–2)

Darwin, he implies, cannot be right because the sun must have been much, much hotter during the geological time scales Darwin presumes. To believe that somewhere or sometime, natural law worked so differently that cooling could be 1000 times slower or erosion, 1000 times faster than the burning and erosion we know, would be absurd. It would be against the fundamental paradigm of uniformity that both Darwin and Thomson embraced. And so, even while working within a common paradigm, the Victorian scientists whose work was the foundation of modern ecology disagreed vehemently on the workings of the natural world. Thomson’s particular objection, moreover, evokes a problem of our own ecological thinking—the presumption that conditions are stable, that nature as we know it doesn’t change. Thomson’s view—that things work similarly on the sun as in the lab—emphasizes a uniformity in natural laws that paradoxically requires huge changes in conditions on earth during evolutionary time frames. Darwin applies his principles of uniformity to the earth over these same time scales. In doing so, he anticipates what Griffiths and Kreisel identify as a key problem in ecological thinking: “The problem with closed concepts of ecology, like totalizing systems in general, is that they tend to freeze things in place, assuming a stability— whether truly fixed or unchanging in its repetition—that foreshortens the horizon of possibility. In a perverse reversal of Lyellian gradualism, the present becomes permanent” (9). Of course, Darwin is not wrong about evolutionary time scales; indeed, the theory of evolution by natural

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selection is all about change over long time scales. Nonetheless, it is important to be clear: while natural laws may be universal, we have to be very careful not to presume that the world as we know it is stable. Said otherwise, there is no background nature against which we act. We may presume that natural laws are invariant over time and space, but nature does not hold still. This simultaneous agreement/disagreement between Thomson and Darwin also suggests strongly the difficulties of settling, even within science, what constitutes nature as it really is. Even when we are sure of natural law, it is extremely difficult—sometimes impossible—to predict the outcomes of extremely complex processes. Furthermore, scientific knowledge is always incomplete. A little fission goes a long way, and its discovery in the early twentieth-century resolves any lingering doubts about the probable lifetime of the sun and its consequences for evolutionary time. Moreover, scientific observations are always framed by both acknowledged and unacknowledged presumptions and perspectives that may vary across discipline and culture, even within a larger consensus. Certainly, acknowledging this difficulty makes the current widespread scientific consensus on climate change4 that much more compelling and urgent, and the power of those cultural discourses that suppress the scientific agreement, that much more important to understand. At the same time, the early energy/evolution exchange also suggests that cultural discourses may enter and shape scientific discourse, which may in turn foster cultural discourse—for good or for ill. As we shall see below, Darwin’s own resistance to new meanings of “energy” participate in a larger cultural discourse that fosters misconceptions about energy that dog us to this day. After all, from an energy perspective, evolution is extremely inefficient. It is not the kind of process that nations or individuals can afford to ape (so to speak). A healthy dose of thermodynamics could have tempered over-­enthusiastic interpretations of evolution as progress. And for all that the science of energy is bound up in a wider cultural predilection for closure, Victorian energy physicists were open to thinking about the implications of energy for what we now call “ecology.”

4  At present, reports say that 97% of climate scientists hold that climate change is real, manmade and a crisis.

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Ecological Entanglement The term “ecology” was first coined by a zoologist, however. Ernst Haeckel was an enthusiastic follower of Darwin. In 1866, he defined “ecology” as the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and organic environment; including above all, its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants with which it comes directly or indirectly into contact. (qtd. in Parham GMH 258)

Actually, Haeckel coined the term in German, Ökologie from the Greek Oikos which refers to the family, the house, and the environment. His “total relations” reflect a very Darwinian sense of the complexity of what constitutes an organism’s environment. Indeed, in the Origin of Species, Darwin reminds his readers to bear in mind “how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life” (55). Ecology, then, seems to be the science that explores all the tangles of Darwin’s “tangled bank” and its plants and birds and insects and worms “so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner” (Origin 303). Among our experimental reading strategies will be to pursue a similarly Darwinian sense of entanglement—considering the connectedness and interdependence of much that seems quite different from the (central concerns of the) text itself. Further, like Darwin, Haeckel’s definition does not distinguish between human and non-human animals, a breadth of vision that extends Darwin’s efforts to understand humans as one species among many, and as part of a larger system of interdependent beings. Resisting the anthropocentric tendencies of his predecessors in natural theology and natural history, Darwin works to deprivilege humanity and decenter man from our picture of the natural world. As literary ecocritic Lawrence Buell puts it, To Darwin, literary and critical ecocentrism owes the definition of homo sapiens as an order of being not created providentially but by a “natural” process that cares no more for whether humans survive than for the welfare of any other species, even if humans happen to be the highest stage of evolution yet. (FEC 100)

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Such indifference among “natural” processes proves a source of considerable anxiety among the Victorians and seems to climax with the arrival of H.G. Wells’s Martians, who trigger just such a sense of Darwinian displacement in the human narrator. Comparing himself to the “poor brutes we dominate,” he experiences firsthand “a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel” (see Chap. 8). Ecocritics, on the other hand, are far from regretting this dethronement; they find the dislocation of humanity incredibly useful—indeed, essential to developing a properly ecocentric perspective on things. It serves as a counterpoint to both the figure of modern man promoted by science and the independent and bounded individual fostered by literature (see Chap. 2). It is a necessary aspect of an ecological reading practice that we work similarly to dethrone and decenter the human as well as the human protagonist at the center of so many of our stories, to pursue entanglements with other species and to see things from other points of view. Haeckel’s “total relations,” moreover, may be understood to go one further than Darwin’s “mutual relations of all organic beings” and Wells’s “animal among animals.” Inorganic and organic, friendly and inimical, direct or indirect, these “total relations” seem to reach beyond what we generally consider “natural” processes, potentially collapsing distinctions between the natural and the cultural. From its inception, ecology invites a kind of interdisciplinarity within and beyond the sciences, a connectedness that is at once at the core of ecocriticism and decidedly Victorian. Indeed, such interdisciplinarity may have been more readily accessible to the Victorians than it is to us. Regenia Gagnier, for one, finds “pre-­disciplinary Victorians … closer to this way of thinking than the rationalized disciplines of the past hundred years, which reduced causality to nature or culture exclusively” (19). And modern environmental science draws on both the social sciences and the humanities to understand the natural world and our relationships to it (Karr 5). The very expansiveness of Haeckel’s definition of ecology, however, and the willingness of Victorians to think across what we think of as disciplinary lines, make the absence of energy in Haeckel’s formulation conspicuous. It is not until the 1930s that Arthur Tansley, the first president of the British Ecological Society, reformulates Haeckel’s definition of ecology to include the study of “all relations among organisms … in terms of

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purely material exchange of energy and of such chemical substances as water, phosphorus, nitrogen, and other nutrients” (qtd in Parham GMH 258). Tansley’s 1930s adaptation of Haeckel is eventually embraced by ecology in fiction and fact. Today, it is clear to anyone who thinks about ecosystems (a term for which Tansley is largely responsible) that the relations among organisms must be those of energy exchange. Ecologists are fully aware of the laws of thermodynamics and the challenges of energy transformation. They know full well that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, though it can change forms. They understand the law of entropy, the notion that energy will ultimately find its way to its least desirable form, as the motion of molecules, as uniform and inaccessible heat, at which point, it will be beyond our merely human or animal grasp. And they understand that all living systems thus borrow energy from other systems to sustain themselves and even grow. This relatively comfortable confluence of physics and biology took some time to achieve, however. By the time Darwin published The Descent of Man in 1871, physical concepts of energy had been widely popularized. Educated readers would be familiar with the notion of this transformable thing called energy, a thing that could manifest as light or heat or gravitational potential or electricity or work. But evolutionary biology and energy science had some differences to resolve before ecology could really benefit from the insights enabled by their overlap. So while on the one hand, we may ask how the two distinct Victorian sciences converged in twentieth-­ century ecology, we may also ask, on the other hand, what took them so long? If, on the one hand, the manifest incompatibility of Victorian physics and evolutionary biology worked against including energy exchange among the “total relations …inorganic and organic,” there were those physicists who saw connections nonetheless.

Boltzmann’s Chemical Kitchen Indeed by 1886, in a popular lecture on the second law of thermodynamics, the physicist and philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann predicts that the nineteenth will be “called the century of the mechanical view of Nature, the century of Darwin” (qtd. in Schuster 1). That he should more or less equate Darwin’s with a mechanical view is not surprising, as for Boltzmann the struggle for existence is less evocative of “nature red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson In Memoriam 55) and more of engineers working to

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create a more efficient engine. He is generally thought to be the first to formulate a thermodynamics of evolution. He explains: … The general struggle for existence of living beings is therefore not a fight for the elements—the elements of all organisms are available in abundance in air, water, and soil—nor for energy, which is plentiful in the form of heat, unfortunately untransformably, in every body. Rather it is a struggle for entropy that becomes available through the flow of energy from the hot Sun to the cold Earth. (qtd. in Schuster 2)

His taking up the “struggle for existence” is unmistakably Darwinian. As is his sense of abundance, although his is curiously lacking in the overtones of violence and competition that reverberate within so many redeployments of Darwin within Victorian culture. And why shouldn’t Boltzmann read “struggle for existence” this way? Darwin himself encourages his reader to construe the term quite broadly, premising that he uses the term “in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny” (Origin 44). Darwin’s “struggle,” then, includes all those productive and reproductive relations as obtain between organisms; not only competition but also cooperation and exchange make up the “economy of nature.” For Haeckel, as we have seen, these constitute the “total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and organic environment.” Boltzmann, in turn, refigures these relations as fundamentally thermodynamic, though not as the struggle for energy, but for entropy—a decidedly thermodynamic, if somewhat confusing choice of term. For all of Boltzmann’s brilliance in thus anticipating the ecosystem concept by almost a half-century, his use of the word “entropy” still remains a matter for interpretation. What, after all, is “a struggle for entropy” if entropy itself is not only abundant, but the inevitable by-product of any process that uses energy—which is to say, of any process. In 1944, however, as if to sustain the confusion, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger will assert that an organism feeds itself on “negative entropy.” Schrödinger explains that “the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive” (qtd. in Schuster 2). In Schrödinger’s formulation, then, the struggle for existence seems not a struggle for entropy, but rather a struggle to escape from entropy—an almost ecological concern regarding the toxic

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effects of our own inevitable waste products. In this way, Schrödinger reasserts a concern with waste that, as we shall see, pervades Victorian social and scientific thought. Meanwhile, Boltzmann himself notes that not all energy is available for use: the object of struggle is not energy per se, “which is plentiful in the form of heat, unfortunately untransformably, in every body” (italics mine), but something else. Ultimately, both Schrödinger’s “negative entropy” and Boltzmann’s “entropy” will be identified with what has come to be known as “free energy”—that energy in any thermodynamic system that is still available to do work. By 1965, the notion that what the organism “feeds upon” is “free energy” is clear from the assertion of the clever but fictional planetary ecologist of Frank Herbert’s Dune who observes at the dinner table that “it’s a rule of ecology…The struggle between life elements is the struggle for the free energy of a system” (174). We can see, moreover, the echoes of the steam engine in Boltzmann’s depiction of (what we will call) an ecosystem. Like a steam engine, life requires a hot spot (an energy source) and a cold spot (an energy sink), between which energy may be said to flow, as it does “from the hot Sun to the cold Earth.” In between, like a water wheel in the path of a running stream, we just hope to get out as much work as possible. As Boltzmann continues: To make the fullest use of this energy, the plants spread out the immeasurable areas of their leaves and harness the Sun’s energy by a process that is still unexplored, before it sinks down to the temperature level of the Earth, to drive chemical syntheses of which one has no inkling as yet in our laboratories. The products of this chemical kitchen are the object of the struggle [in] the animal world. (qtd. in Schuster 2)

What Boltzmann envisions is a struggle for efficiency, for energy storage and use, not unlike that sought by engineers from James Watt to James Thomson. What matters in “the struggle for existence” is an organism’s ability to hold on to and make use of the heat and light energy provided by the sun, either by harnessing it directly (as plants do) or by imbibing it in its stored form, the edible products of Boltzmann’s “chemical kitchen”— a domestic as well as a mechanical view. This assertion of abundance and plenty, followed by his depiction of plants endowed with such laudable domestic inclinations, seems even more in keeping with Haeckel’s language of “total relations” than with the language of struggle and survival.

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Further, the “chemical kitchen,” like the roots of “ecology” in “oikos,” posits the organism’s natural environment as a household. His figure reminds us that the kitchen, the household, and the ecosystem are all dependent on energy that comes from outside—just the sort of complex, non-equilibrium systems that would require non-equilibrium thermodynamics for their fullest description. Neither the plant nor the planet is a closed system, but rather each is blessed with a constant influx of energy from the sun. The trick, of course, is to harness it before it dissipates, and life itself becomes a challenge in engineering. The struggle thus identified suggests the high energetic cost of life and even of evolutionary processes, which take vast amounts of energy in its various forms. Boltzmann’s framing of Darwinian struggle thus seems to avoid those troubling implications of closure and stability that, as we shall see, attached to other notions of how the machinery of life works.

The Machinery of Life Machines change a good deal from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, as do conceptions of machinery. If the iconic eighteenth-century machine is a clock—delicate, reversible, Newtonian, and with the possibility (however remote) of running forever—the iconic nineteenth-century machine is the steam engine, which declares loudly that energy flow is unidirectional. It runs out and must be continually resupplied. Where Boltzmann’s sense of life as machinery suggests powerfully this dependence on an external source of energy that must be continually resupplied, this notion of machinery enters the nineteenth-century imagination slowly and incompletely. The science of energy builds upon the work of engineers struggling to create a better steam engine, one that runs down more slowly, but for all the evidence to the contrary, many find it hard to let go of the possibility of a perfect machine. James Prescott Joule, the Manchester brewer whose work was so important to the development of thermodynamics, clung to the notion of the universe as such a perfect machine. Though his experiments repeatedly suggest that what we will call energy is ultimately lost to heat, he nonetheless insists that in the mutual conversions of light, “heat, living force [kinetic energy], and attraction through space … into one another…nothing is ever lost” (qtd in Gold 39). From an 1847 lecture at St. Ann’s Church, this assertion is an early formulation of what will become the first law of thermodynamics. It is also an interpretation of Joule’s own work

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based on a faith in God, which serves as an unquestioned framing paradigm: “We might reason, a priori, that such absolute destruction of living force cannot possibly take place, because it is manifestly absurd to suppose that the powers with which God has endowed matter can be destroyed any more than they can be created by man’s agency” (qtd in Gold 58). This a priori reasoning undergirds a notion of the universe as a perfectly efficient machine. While human contrivances invariably lose a good deal of energy to heat, the universe according to Joule suffers no such degradation: Thus it is that order is maintained in the universe—nothing is deranged, nothing ever lost, but the entire machinery, complicated as it is, works smoothly and harmoniously… everything may appear complicated…yet is the most perfect regularity preserved—the whole being governed by the sovereign will of God. (273)

In this way, Joule expresses a faith that the losses he observes are a matter of scale. Things may look complicated, even messy, at our level, but the whole is orderly and conservative. Disorder (what we will come to comprehend under the term “entropy”) is provisional and local. Joule’s comprehensive language further bespeaks a fantasy of universal closure: “nothing is ever lost” “such absolute destruction” “the universe” “the entire machinery” “the whole.” And this image of the universe as a perfectly conservative machine will echo in the traditional formulation of the laws of thermodynamics, so that they require the perpetual (if unspoken) caveat that they obtain only within the confines of a closed system. Nonetheless, the principles of thermodynamics apply to every system, open or closed, albeit with different emphases. For the nineteenth-century physicist, the metaphor that connects life and machinery bespeaks not only a structural likeness but also an identity. Living systems run down for the same reason as mechanical systems—because the laws of thermodynamics govern the workings of living as well as non-living machines. Joule can thus confidently generalize that all of “the phenomena of nature, whether mechanical, chemical, or vital, consist almost entirely in a continual conversion of attraction through space, living force, and heat into one another” (273), in the continual transformation of what will come to be called energy. In the same St. Ann’s lecture, Joule identifies our dependence on these processes: “Our existence,” he explains, “depends upon the maintenance of the living force of the earth,” on the kinetic energy of the earth in its orbit. Like Boltzman’s energy-inflected ecology, this

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statement emphasizes our dependence on energy from outside our immediate vicinity. We don’t really have access to the “living force” or what will come to be called the “kinetic energy” of the earth (although if the earth does stop moving, we are certainly in trouble!). Nonetheless, Joule may well have been thinking of La Place’s “nebular hypothesis,” which posits that the solar system was formed by the cooling of what was originally a rotating cloud of very hot gas. In any case, Joule understands that “our safety equally depends in some instances upon the conversion of living force into heat” (272). And though he is explicit that when he uses the term “living force,” he means it metaphorically “as there is no life properly speaking” (266–7) implied in the energy of motion, the metaphor slips into analogy and identity, as the principles apply to living and non-living beings alike. Thermodynamically speaking, living and non-living beings are alike, but they are not equal. In spite of his sense of our dependence on large amounts of energy from without, Joule’s optimism leads him to maintain a sense of the efficiency of living organisms that thermodynamics ultimately cannot sustain. In 1852, he observes that there are three classes of engines “which derive their power from the operation of chemical forces” (363), engines that run, that is, on some kind of fuel. The more work an engine can get out of the fuel put in, the better. And though he can’t account for the mechanisms, he believes quite consistently that living beings constitute the first class of engines, “those exquisite machines in which chemical forces operate by the mysterious intervention of life” (363). These first-class engines are, according to Joule, far more efficient than second-class electrical engines or such third-class contrivances as the steam engine. Indeed, he holds “that the animal frame…is as a machine more perfect than the best contrived steam-engine—that is, is capable of more work with the same expenditure of fuel” (363). For Joule, living organisms achieve an energetic efficiency to which human engineers can only aspire, as they work to improve their own machines. There are powerful elements of fantasy or at least an excess of optimism in this assessment of life’s efficiency; living organisms actually use huge amounts of energy—more so as they grow larger and more complex. And though Joule expresses an almost Darwinian amazement at the superiority of “Nature’s productions,” from an energetic perspective, evolution by natural selection is an almost unimaginably wasteful process. This wastefulness is not immediately clear, however, from Darwin’s suggestions that natural selection is a grand feat of engineering. While

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biology and physics both deployed images of life as machinery, these images were/could be interpreted quite differently. Where Joule’s claims regarding the first-class engines of life are literal, Darwin frequently feels the need to clarify, even apologize, that he is speaking metaphorically. When Darwin evokes “the machinery of life,” we recognize a familiar figure of speech that gestures toward eighteenth-century notions of a mechanical universe (Origin 57). Asserting “Nature’s productions [are] far ‘truer’ in character than man’s productions” and that they “plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship,” Darwin subtly recalls the language of natural theology (Origin 57). He does not insist, as William Paley did, that the complexity of natural systems implies the existence of God—that a watch implies a watchmaker—but his language of “workmanship” is suggestive of that most familiar eighteenth-century machine. In this way, Darwin’s machinery of life retains a decidedly pre-thermodynamic flavor. Nonetheless, Darwin’s evocation of “the machinery of life” introduces a decidedly literary ambiguity that (like Boltzmann’s and sometimes Joule’s) could facilitate more ecological thinking than is often associated with our visions of nature as a mechanical system. As is well known, analogical thinking is all over the Origin of Species (1859). Devin Griffiths, in his book The Age of Analogy, explores in depth not only the centrality of analogical thinking to Darwin’s work but also the ways in which this represents a wider shift in how the past was understood.5 Griffiths further understands Darwin’s thinking as indebted to “historical fiction and other imaginative genres” (2). In his most familiar analogy, Darwin reasons that natural selection is like artificial selection. In the latter, a breeder of pigeons or horses or cabbages or what-have-you, can select for desired traits with each subsequent generation. Analogously, natural selection chooses the traits most desirable for the survival of the organism and the production of similarly favored offspring. Nature, in this analogy, is like the human breeder. But Darwin’s nature has many faces, and one at least is an engineer. Nature may turn her engineer’s eye upon the organ—as when Darwin discusses the “optical instrument” (Origin6 Ch VI)—the individual, the species, or something greater:

5  Indeed, as Griffiths puts it, “the Darwins, both Erasmus and Charles, conveniently frame the seventy-year period over which comparative historicism emerged as a dominant procedure for thinking about and writing about the past” (6).

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Nature, if I may be allowed to personify the natural preservation or survival of the fittest, cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they are useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. (Origin 57, italics mine)

This is one of the best-known passages of the Origin of Species. And Darwin’s enthusiasm as well as his sense of nature as a machine seems to dovetail nicely with Joule’s vision of the exquisite machinery of life. Unlike Joule’s “universe,” however, Darwin’s “whole machinery” is characteristically ambiguous: we cannot tell for sure whether the whole refers to the organism, the species, the ecosystem or the universe. And as long as we hold to this ambiguity, perhaps “whole” need not imply a closed system. Like the visions of both Boltzmann and Joule, Darwin’s metaphors can work to suggest wider webs of interdependence, even as they sustain a fantasy of perfection and closure. Darwin further compares natural selection to the collaborative work of mechanical contrivance. He looks forward to the day when we understand the gradual processes of evolution as like the piecemeal work of engineers in the development of machinery: …when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a long history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, in the same way as any great mechanical invention is the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen (Origin 301)

How much more interesting will natural history be, Darwin opines, when we can look at Nature as we look at the developers of any mechanical invention. Adaptation of the organism takes time, even as humanity must work gradually to improve its machines. Neither engineering nor natural selection can justify belief in an original perfect state. The process of development, moreover, involves a good deal of waste—to which we will return below. In the meantime, the comparison of natural selection to the improvement of machinery, focuses our attention and Darwin’s on the kinds of issues that preoccupy engineers, on questions of improvability and efficiency, and the minimization or reuse of waste. On the one hand, Darwin thus contributes to the pervasive belief within science that nature will function with the underlying stability of a mechanical system—a belief

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that can constrain or mislead modern ecological science (see Chap. 2). At the same time, Darwin’s insistence that “every production of nature [has] a long history” can suggest the openness of systems, especially in emphasizing that organisms have histories, long chains of dependencies, and multiple entanglements with other beings. These gestures toward openness, connectedness and contingency, which characterize a more ecological way of thinking, depend on how we interpret Darwin’s ambiguous “whole,” on how long we take “history” to be, and on just how many contrivances, blunders and even workmen, on just how much complexity, we allow for in our “summing up.” Our interpretive choices thus matter considerably in how we understand the world around us. Do we insist on a stability and closure in natural systems that the laws of thermodynamics disallow, or do we embrace a potentially overwhelming sense of the interconnectedness of all things? For, the machinery of life is a metaphor that sticks. It is rendered monstrous throughout the nineteenth century, from the mechanical woman of Hoffman’s “The Sandman” through the Martians of Wells’s War of the Worlds, wherein the living quality of the Martians’ handling machines is quite literally stunning. So acute does Wells’s narrator find “the contrast between the swift and complex movements of these contrivances and the inert panting clumsiness of their masters” that he must continually remind himself which “were indeed the living of the two things” (107). This confluence of life and machinery is not always productive of such horror, however. Energy physics joins the two under the same physical principles. And our experimental readings of the War of the Worlds, among the rest, will redirect our attention to the more ecologically viable aspects of interpreting energy and ecosystems.

What Is Waste? I have repeatedly alluded above to the wastefulness of both living and mechanical systems, and it seems to me that rethinking waste is essential to more ecological modes of being. Likely, this is not a surprise to the reader, who may be working to use less plastic (since it never really decomposes) or who has spent many an hour sorting paper and glass and aluminum into big yellow bins. Anyone who has had trouble with their plumbing has probably gotten a step closer to the ecological thought that Timothy Morton enjoins: “It isn’t like thinking about where your toilet waste goes. It is thinking about where your toilet waste goes” (ET 130). And while

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“fatberg” had not yet become a household word, waste worked in numerous ways in nascent Victorian discourses of ecology. Then, as now, waste in popular parlance evoked such synonyms as refuse, debris, and sewage. Moreover, when we think about the failure to properly use, reuse, or recycle our natural resources, we often consider household or metropolitan waste in nearly energetic terms. Waste in engineering generally refers to usable energy lost (usually to heat due to friction) in any process that yields work. But according to the laws of thermodynamics, the idea that we should conserve energy is both unnecessary and impossible. Energy per se is always conserved in a closed system, and do what we will, it will become less and less usable. It will become waste heat. Thus, waste is energy in another form—albeit one that is largely inaccessible. Conservation, waste, and usability are tightly tied concepts in both incarnations. And how we think about waste more broadly may reinforce or resist our dominant ways of thinking about systems—may emphasize an impossible sense of closure and independence or may remind us of our entanglements with what we ordinarily consider other systems, places, peoples, and beings. James Prescott Joule was an expert in thermodynamic waste. Most of his experiments investigated the conversion of various forms of energy into heat, and on finding efficient ways to convert energy to work while minimizing heat loss due to friction. Henry Mayhew was an expert on the other kind of waste. Author of London Labour and the London Poor (a series of journal articles published in 2 volumes in 1851), Mayhew expresses outrage that so much effort and expense went to the importation of guano for fertilizer. He considered this a highly troubling “failure of conservation” when there was so much “ready manure [available for] circulation and transformation” (qtd. in Choi 310). In both modes, waste reinforces our overwhelming cultural predilection for closed systems, even as it suggests alternatives to that model. Both energetically and at the scale of municipal recycling, the desire to eliminate waste and the fantasy of doing so perfectly can reinforce the fantasy of the closed (energy) independent system. They needn’t do so, however. In a recent piece on Henry Mayhew, Barbara Leckie argues that the open and unfinished form of London Labour and the London Poor goes beyond the more familiar model of a closed ecology implied elsewhere in Mayhew’s work. Instead, the very unwieldiness of this work evokes a different, more open ecology “that is sensitive to the creative fertility of ‘rags and refuse’” and that understands the city not as “a bounded whole but [as] a dynamic, mobile, and open

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network of relations” (Leckie 220, 221, 227). Mayhew thus emerges as an early environmentalist, whose visions of the city could work to reinforce a problematic imagination of ecosystems as closed or to open these up in the interests of wider entanglements. The susceptibility of his work to these very different, even conflicting interpretations, may recall for the reader the very different ways in which we may interpret the implications of thermodynamics, emphasizing the necessity of closure or the interdependence of systems that cannot be closed. Both of these, moreover, attach to questions of what to do with/ about—indeed, what we identify as—waste. A sense of the analogies, even the identities, between thermodynamic waste and sewage, moreover, may make it less surprising that Joule, an expert in the former, nonetheless spoke out about the latter. He steps out of his wheelhouse, because he feels it is his civic duty. Dismayed at the imminent adoption of a plan for metropolitan drainage, he feels compelled to lend a word “On the Utilization of the Sewage of London and other large Towns” (386–99) before returning, in his next paper, to his more characteristic “Experiments on the Heat developed by Friction in Air” (399–402). Joule says what needs to be said, and what must be clear from the evidence of nearly every scientific chemist, regarding the considerable importance of “saving the manure of cities” (392). In the current plan, the policy makers have forgotten, he says, their first object, “the economical use of sewage,” in order to focus exclusively on the second, “the beauty and healthfulness of the metropolis” (388). According to Joule, under the current plan the latter will be satisfied only provisionally, and the former, not at all. Once the sewage is diluted and removed, it simply will not pay to recuperate the vast majority of the fertilizing matter thus removed from the city. The sense of irrecoverable loss that drives the development of the laws of thermodynamics may be seen echoed in Joule’s dismay at the new plans for metropolitan sewage. As we shall see in all of the chapters to come, the sense of both London and England as limited in resources underscores much of nineteenth-­ century literature. By 1825, London is already the world’s largest city and its population increases exponentially over the course of the nineteenth century. Joule himself hails from another rapidly growing city: Manchester. But Joule’s sense of potential loss of already-limited resources also comes from his intimacy with thermodynamic systems. Over a year before Darwin publishes the Origin of Species and nearly three decades before Boltzmann

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describes his “chemical kitchen,” Joule’s observations on the problems of sewage removal reveal a nascent ecosystem concept. Drawing on the work of agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig (whom we may thank for organic chemistry), he argues for the importance of what we generally think of as waste: The mineral ingredients of food have been obtained from our fields, having been removed from them in the form of seeds, of roots, and of herbs. In the vital processes of animals the combustible elements of the food are converted into compounds of oxygen, while the urine and faeces contain the constituents of the soil abstracted from our fields; so that by incorporating these excrements with our land we restore it to its original state of fertility. (qtd. in “Sewage” 392)

First read in November 1858, this lecture comes on the heels of what was known as the “Great Stink” of central London of July and August, when concern for the healthfulness of the Thames prompted plans for relieving the city. Expressing his concerns that the plan just adopted for metropolitan drainage “must be fraught with disastrous consequences to the national prosperity” (386), Joule steps in to remedy the deficiency of scientific voices involved in that regrettable decision. His focus is on the non-­ renewability of soil once waste in the form of sewage is removed from the city. He is thus far from Boltzmann’s happy conviction “the elements of all organisms are available in abundance in air, water, and soil,” even as he considers the output of the “chemical kitchen” in the seeds, roots and herbs which provide food for the animal. The nod to their “combustible elements” suggests further how Joule’s first-class engines of life fit into a larger system from which they draw their nourishment. Some of these, Boltzmann will recognize as processed from the energy of the sun, though even for him photosynthesis remains “a process that is still unexplored.” Eventually, we will also understand the minerals obtained from the fields as other products of stellar energy—though the concept of nuclear fusion that produces all the elements is far away. And in any case, replacing these minerals is no easy feat—as Joule observes. As he moves from the concept of living machines to what we would call an ecosystem, his thinking becomes patently environmental as well as implicitly thermodynamic. His essay exhibits many of the features of late twentieth-century ecological writing—of what Lawrence Buell has dubbed “toxic discourse.” In the language of an environmental reformer, Joule

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questions the wisdom of beautifying the metropolis by making a stink down river. Though it may temporarily address the object of improving the health and beauty of the metropolis, the proposed system must nonetheless be considered a filthy one, as instead of removing sewage to the soil, which is the natural deodorizer, it will cause its accumulation in the bed of the river at a distance of only a few miles from the city. (391)

That he identifies soil as a “natural deodorizer,” suggests that the drainage of sewage is not only unsanitary, but decidedly unnatural. It is also not hard to see how his concern regarding sewage is both analogous to and actually a thermodynamic system. Indeed, we may calculate the decline in what Joule calls, with clear thermodynamic echoes, the “productive power” of the land. This decline in productive power may be calculated by determining the amount of food consumed by London’s current two-­ million-­plus inhabitants. Whatever soil nutriment has been used in producing this food must be the same as that which is carried away in excrement removed by this new system of metropolitan drainage. Indeed, Joule continues by noting that with a population on the rise, “we ought not to be satisfied with merely keeping the productive power of our agriculture from decline”(395). And importing guano is a very temporary stopgap, because even before the stores run out, other countries will compete for it. Thus, Joule suggests that the current system is unsustainable— chemically, thermodynamically, and politically. Joule’s observations on this urban ecology, like so many others, may reflect contradictory ways of thinking about ecosystems. Knowing Joule as we do, and his predilection for conservative systems in which “nothing is deranged, nothing ever lost,” we could easily understand Joule, as we may understand (some of) Mayhew, as reinforcing a sense of the city as, ideally, a closed system. Removing sewage from the city effectively opens the system, drawing off elements that it still needs and requiring their replacement from without. On the other hand, Joule’s wider attention may lead us to consider the impossibility of such closure, and the entanglement of multiple systems and ecosystems. Though he passes quickly over the smaller questions of impeded river traffic and the destruction of fish, as he pursues the bigger question “ultimately involving the life and subsistence of an entire population,” he emphasizes that it is not just about London. Like a fine social ecologist, he opines, “By what justice a nuisance can be

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removed from ourselves to be placed under the noses of our neighbours I know not” (390). He further considers the loss to the country that comes from importing livestock to the city for slaughter, and even the decline in fertility of neighbors further away: “On the whole, considering the enormous quantities of imported food, this country must be acquiring great fertilizing potentiality at the expense of America and other lands which are being impoverished to supply our present needs” (np399, 1882). These, no doubt, will be among those other countries competing for the dwindling stores of guano. At the same time that Joule thus directs our attention to the effects on and of a system larger than London, he identifies a problem in a different kind of closure—that stemming from blinding attention to a single social system: There are those “who treat the subject entirely as a commercial one,” by which measure, the proper utilization of sewage cannot (at the moment) compete with the importation of guano to fertilize the land. To do so, however, is to ignore key entanglements of any such monetary assessment. And Joule finds this to be a “fallacious, narrow-minded, and selfish view of the subject” (395). We may save a little money now, but by doing so, we leave a heavy burden on those who come after us, when guano stores have run out and we have used up the capacity of the land to produce sustenance (394–5). We can also see in both Mayhew and Joule, how “waste” may serve as the abject against which we measure what constitutes the system or as energy in another form, that we can use well or poorly.

How Darwin Handles Waste If the concern for waste draws an engineer and physicist such as Joule into biological and agricultural questions, the naturalist Darwin finds waste no less fascinating and no less disturbing. Waste captures Darwin’s imagination repeatedly in his early voyages. In some cases, waste for Darwin evokes those landscapes that have lost what Joule would call “productive power.” The forests “of Tierra del Fuego, where Death and decay prevail” and the “wretched and useless” plains of Patagonia rival in sublimity the Brazilian forests “where the powers of Life are predominant,” and Darwin wonders why such “arid wastes [have] taken so firm a hold on [his] memory” (Beagle 352). Generally out there, such waste places may serve as the outside that defines the system that they are not, even as they suggest that soil depletion is not exclusively an urban development. But waste proves inescapable, as it appears everywhere, albeit on a smaller scale. Darwin

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thus worries about the waste of living matter that could have been used more efficiently. He repeatedly marvels at the wastefulness of certain birds: the ostrich and the American cowbird, who, not having achieved the efficiency of the European cuckoo, not only drop “many eggs on the bare ground, which are thus wasted,” but have “the extraordinary habit of pecking holes in the eggs, whether of their own species or of their foster parents, which they find in the appropriated nests” (Origin6 Ch VIII). We will return to this nationalistic turn in Darwin’s thinking. Meanwhile, in contradistinction to Joule’s view of the efficiency of first-class living machines, Darwin’s machinery of nature proves worrisomely wasteful, Darwin, however, is able to reconceive the meaning and usefulness of waste. In what we may think of as a kind of rhetorical recycling, Darwin is able to rethink the implications of the waste evident in nature—not only in the excess of seeds or eggs or offspring who will not survive, but also in the extinction of species, past and (it must be assumed) future. The novel, as we shall see with Great Expectations, deals with this waste by turning our attention to the single seed (Pip) who does survive. For Darwin, the waste itself becomes a significant part of the mechanism by which the machinery of nature works. As is well known, Darwin’s thinking on natural selection has roots in T. R. Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, thinking whose echoes we may find not only in Jane Eyre’s Lowood struggles, but more subtly throughout the works of Jane Austen, wherein we frequently find some version of the troubles that plague the mother of Fanny Price—that is, “such a superfluity of children, and such a want of almost everything else” (MP 6, see Chaps. 5 and 6). More so than Austen, however, Darwin wishes to apply “the doctrine of Malthus… to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms” (Origin 8). A political economist in his day, Malthus is nonetheless remembered among biologists and ecologists for establishing the first principle of population dynamics: a population (increasing geometrically) would always outstrip its sustenance (which increases only arithmetically). He is explicitly concerned with the scarcity of resources, which somewhat counter-intuitively, leads to considerable waste. Among plants and animals, the effects of inevitable shortages of space and nutriment are, according to Malthus, “waste of seed, sickness and premature death” (5). But even for Malthus, who paints a pretty grim picture, waste goes hand in hand with abundance, scarcity, with plenty. He writes:

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Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand. She has been comparatively sparing in the room and the nourishment necessary to rear them. (5)

Since his first concern is with the question of the ultimate perfectibility of mankind, Malthus finds the proverbial glass half empty. Humans will not be able to perfect themselves, because the earth will not support its population growth, and if you can’t feed all of the people all of the time, “vice and misery” must follow (5). Darwin, however, is concerned with the “whole animal and vegetable kingdoms” (Origin 8), and by dislocating humans from the center of his vision, he is able to shift figure and ground. This shifting is one of Darwin’s moves to resist anthropocentrism and an important feature of ecological thinking. It also reshapes his understanding of waste. If “populations” include all animal and vegetable life, then the distinction between population and sustenance shifts with point of view—a shifting that we will return to as a strategy for experimental reading. For Darwin, the result is that fecundity is not, as it was to Malthus, “a danger to be suppressed—particularly by draconian measures among the human poor” (Beer DP 29). Instead, it signals productivity, increased resources, and growth potential. Ultimately, the “power of Life,” is even more compelling than death and decay: “To Darwin fecundity was a liberating and creative principle, leading to increased variability, increased potential for change and development” (Beer DP 29). Much waste can be tolerated for the potential it brings for change and improvement. Darwin thus can teach us to embrace the waste. From the point of view of efficiency, however, evolution by natural selection is a very wasteful process—lots of death, lots of loss, lots of energy put into life that does not propagate forward. Darwin catalogs quite a few of the more wasteful “contrivances of nature.” We needn’t marvel, he tells us …at the sting of the bee causing the bee’s own death; at drones being produced in such vast numbers for one single act, and being then slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the astonishing waste of pollen by our fir-trees… (Origin 293)

Although he tells us we needn’t, Darwin is clearly guilty of considerable marveling at such apparently wasteful structures. He also marvels a good

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deal at the fact of extinction, though he similarly assures us that it is, in fact, presumptuous to do so. He nonetheless allows that we may as well wonder that more of nature’s “contrivances” aren’t similarly imperfect: “The wonder, indeed, is, on the theory of natural selection, that more cases of the want of absolute perfection have not been detected” (Origin 293). The surprising fact that there are not more imperfect structures is the exception that proves the rule for Darwin. Imperfection, moreover, leads him back to reasoning by analogy to human-made machines: Almost every part of every organic being is so beautifully related to its complex conditions of life that it seems as improbable that any part should have been suddenly produced perfect, as that a complex machine should have been invented by man in a perfect state. (Origin6 Ch II)

From an engineering perspective, species could not possibly have been created in their current near-perfect state. Like any good engineer, natural selection has to work through considerable time and multiple trials to increase efficiency in the machinery of life. But the results may be seen in the impressive reproductive efficiency achieved by such species as the European cuckoo and one North American cowbird (Molothrus pectoris), who “never lays more than one egg in a foster-nest, so that the young bird is securely reared” (Origin6 Ch VIII). In terms that link the mechanism of evolution to both energetics and economics, Darwin suggests that such efficient use of resources—both labor and nutriment, work and fuel—is itself an adaptive trait. Among bees, for example, the motive power of the process of natural selection having been the construction of cells of due strength and of the proper size and shape for the larvae, this being effected with the greatest possible economy of labour and wax; that individual swarm which thus made the best cells with least labour, and least waste of honey in the secretion of wax, having succeeded best, and having transmitted their newly acquired economical instincts to new swarms, which in their turn will have had the best chance of succeeding in the struggle for existence. (Origin6 Ch VIII, italics mine)

Darwin’s terms strongly echo a host of engineering narratives: “Motive power” is a strikingly thermodynamic phrase, which generally refers to the energy or natural agency (steam, water, etc.) used to drive an engine, to put a machine into motion. “Economy of labour” evokes at once the economics and the physics of “work,” itself a term that refers to the energy of

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a force applied over some distance (as in the work/energy required to lift an object of a certain mass to a certain height). In spite of the independence maintained by the two sciences, we thus see how Darwin’s language echoes Joule’s many writings on “the dynamical theory of heat.” The most important applications of this theory, according to Joule, is “the production of motive power from chemical and other actions”—that is, the construction of “an engine which shall approach perfection as nearly as possible” (363) by transforming fuel into motion or work without losing (much) energy to heat. In Darwin’s language, what is put in motion is “the process of natural selection;” and the best engine is the best bee, or rather, the swarm that requires the least input of work and supplies and that produces the least waste. Such concerns are by no means exclusive to bees. “Natural selection,” Darwin assures us, “is continually trying to economise in every part of the organisation” (Origin 96). His language here is typically ambiguous; “organisation” could as easily refer to the bee, the swarm, or the whole ecosystem. In this case, he refers manifestly to the growth of the individual, but the principles apply at every level. Citing the “law of compensation or balancement of growth,” Darwin deploys something very like a law of conservation—“in order to spend on one side, nature is forced to economise on the other side” (qtd in Origin 95). Such economy implies that limited resources are available and are best used sparingly. If conditions change such that a previously useful structure becomes less so, nature’s engineering will favor “its diminution … for it will profit the individual not to have its nutriment wasted in building up a useless structure” (Origin 96). Sadly, this mediated view of nutriment seems to be as close as Darwin comes to a thermodynamically informed model of evolution by natural selection. Much of his thinking on “energy” is hijacked by the cultural baggage attached to the term—baggage, it seems, that no amount of popular science can fully dispel.

Darwin’s (Mis)Uses of Energy The Victorian era marked the beginning of both the social and scientific aspects of modern ecology. We can also see in them many of the problems that challenge contemporary ecology and ecocriticism. If an expectation that nature will function with the regularity and predictability of a machine has limited our ability to think creatively about ecosystems (see Botkin DH), our association of nature with machines has also done much to

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enable such thinking. Similarly double-edged has been our thinking about energy, whose double life as both a quality of character and a quantifiable phenomenon of nature, has enabled and troubled some of our best thinking about the ecosystems we inhabit. His use of “energy,” however, is one way in which Darwin’s optimism may have inadvertently contributed to our current ecological problems. On the one hand, his embrace of the wastefulness of nature is part of a naturalist’s loving picture of the world. On the other hand, his accounts of nature’s plenty may have overshot the mark in their effects on human usage. Notably, Darwin’s thinking on energy participates in obfuscations that enable its often unthinking and generally unsustainable misuse, both linguistic and literal. If William Thomson was a rather outspoken opponent of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, Darwin himself was notably, if quietly, resistant to acknowledging the emergent scientific meanings of “energy.” At first glance, it may seem that his work responds to the wide popularization of energy concepts that occurs during the 1860s: The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex uses eighteen variants of the word “energy,” where The Voyage of the Beagle uses only four, and the Origin of Species, just two. But while this increase in usage seems consistent with the popularization of thermodynamic concepts, Darwin does not stray from the pre-thermodynamic sense of the word. As Maria Bertram finds in Mary Crawford “the same energy of character” as her brother, and Jane Eyre resolves to show St. John Rivers “energies he has not yet seen, resources he has never suspected” (MP 50, JE 345), Darwin conceives of “energy [as] a characteristic of men” (Descent 427). That is, Darwin uses the word “energy” to evoke a quality, rather than the physical thing that it is increasingly taken to be—although that quality seems to converge with scientific energy in that both are associated with doing something called, in their respective arenas, work. Darwin, moreover, associates such energy with man more frequently than with any other animal, though the Origin does feature some energetic ants, and Sexual Selection admires the energy displayed by the adult males of certain South American crested tree lizards. And in spite of the fact that the first use of “energy” in The Voyage of the Beagle refers to a party of girls who “sung with great energy a wild song” (10), it soon becomes clear that the Descent is concerned not only with energy as a characteristic of mankind, but with energy as a specifically masculine quality. This “energy of man, in comparison with woman,” Darwin argues, was “acquired during primeval times,” along with his greater size, strength, courage, and pugnacity (Descent 382).

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These species- and gender-inflected distinctions somewhat undermine Darwin’s own project of displacing mankind from his traditional privileged place in the workings of nature. And Darwin’s use of energy, thus doubly anthropocentric, is also rather Anglocentric. Energy figures as a rather amorphous resource, unquantifiable except in relative terms. When you get down to it, the English just have more. As Allen MacDuffie argues, “it was widely recognized that England’s position as a global power was predicated upon its energy resources,” the natural resources to which the empire had access (VLEEI 116). Darwin himself repeatedly refers to Britain as “a well-stocked island” (Origin 227). It seems, however, that the energy possessed by the English does not render them self-sufficient so much as it enables them to triumph in encounters with those less energetic: The remarkable success of the English as colonists, compared to other European nations, has been ascribed to their “daring and persistent energy”; a result which is well illustrated by comparing the progress of the Canadians of English and French extraction; but who can say how the English gained their energy? (Descent 179)

This political comparison between English and French, Darwin suggests, hardly requires explication; just look at Canada. But Darwin’s observations regarding English energy are less evocative of his thinking about the evolution of species, and more of the commonplaces of British imperialist politics. As Pip would have it, “we Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable to doubt our having and our being the best of everything” (Dickens GE 20). Similarly, without direct evidence, Darwin seems to embrace the widely held belief that there was some “quality in the national character that made the English better managers of those resources, and thus uniquely deserving of that power” (116). Even British spiders are decidedly less wasteful than foreign ones, which Darwin observes in his travels, as “it is well known that most of the British spiders” prefer to cut lines and liberate a large insect caught in their web, in order “to save their nets from being entirely spoiled” (Beagle 31) If this is what we can expect from British spiders, can we be surprised that the “active industry” of British colonists—the energy of character that makes them willing as well as able to do the work needed—positions them uniquely to make use of even the unprepossessing resources of a volcanic island. Darwin thus admires the ship-shape condition maintained by colonists on the island of Ascension and “the active industry, which had

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created such effects out of such means.” He remarks (modestly proffering the opinion as that of the French surgeon and naturalist, René Primevère Lesson) that only “the English nation would have thought of making the island of Ascension a productive spot, any other people would have held it as a mere fortress in the ocean” (Beagle 344). Such industry also implies a minimization of waste, as demonstrated by the British “management of the springs, so that a single drop of water may not be lost: indeed the whole island may be compared to a huge ship kept in first-rate order” (Beagle 344). Somewhat counter-intuitively, this capacity to use resources efficiently may be attributed to having come from such a “well-stocked island, like Great Britain,” which not only protects such an island from receiving many “immigrants from Europe or any other continent” (Origin 227), but also because in a well-stocked country, the competition among the inhabitants would have been more severe, and “thus the standard of perfection will have been rendered higher” (Origin 131). And though “perfection” must always depend on context, having the energy of character to make the best use of energy resources must always be favored. Such ongoing use of “energy” as a je-ne-sais-quoi quality of character has led to a wealth of misconceptions and misdirections—throughout Victorian culture and our own. This is especially the case when such usage appears in scientific work, where we might mistakenly expect “energy” to mean a quantifiable physical quantity subject to exact laws and relatively predictable behavior. Darwin, as we have seen, participates in such a failure to differentiate. Without being particularly exacting regarding what energy is, Darwin explicitly poses the question of whether human “energy” can be accounted for by processes of natural selection. For such accounting, he turns from Canada southward: There is apparently much truth in the belief that the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the results of natural selection; for the more energetic, restless, and courageous men from all parts of Europe have emigrated during the last ten or twelve generations to that great country, and have there succeeded best. (Descent 179)

By this model, competition among the most energetic European immigrants, themselves (self-) selected for their energy, will in turn select for a nation of truly energetic people. There are numerous troubling conversations to be had about such an observation, but for our purposes here, I wish only to note that this narrative of human energy elides a wealth of

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other natural resources. It is not merely the energy of the people that fuels the progress of nations, but the resources those people have (or take) at their disposal. But even though he acknowledges that the problem of the advance of civilization is a difficult one, it is nonetheless apparent to Darwin “that a nation which produced during a lengthened period the greatest number of highly intellectual, energetic, brave, patriotic, and benevolent men, would generally prevail over less favoured nations” (Descent 180). Energy begets more energy, he implies. It’s only natural. Except of course, it isn’t—at least, not in classical thermodynamics, wherein we cannot create energy at all; we can only transform usable energy into other forms. Darwin thus contributes to some “highly mystifying fantasies about energy, which persist today and have helped make [our energy] crisis as intractable as it is” (MacDuffie VLEEI 12). Such uses obscure the directions in which physical energy and resources flow, even as they ascribe thermodynamic principles where and how they don’t really apply. And even though a nation is not a closed system, Darwin works from a Malthusian view of scarcity that often perceives it as such. Even though the nation, indeed the earth, is not a closed system, even though we are, as Boltzmann makes clear, blessed with an abundance of solar energy processed into food in the earth’s “chemical kitchen,” no amount of photosynthesis can assuage the anxiety of a nation that perceives itself as limited in resources. This is especially true when compounded by a flattering self-portrait of independence and self-sufficiency—themselves forms of closure. The vision of entropic decay that attaches to closure then heightens anxieties of resource depletion. When we approach the Malthusian trap, when our population exceeds our capacity to feed it, or when we approach Malthusian trap 2.0 and our lifestyle becomes one that we cannot sustainably maintain, we then start to feel as if the system had better be opened. Resources must be brought in from elsewhere, even as we lay claim to being more energetic than anyone else is. Our “energy” both enables and requires us to expand. And though, as Joule suggests regarding guano, this view of things is “fallacious, narrow-minded, and selfish” (395), it nonetheless endures. Our perceptions of scarcity, our fantasies of independence, and our (mis)understandings of the natural world drive us to narrate rings around our own anxieties. As we have seen briefly above, scientific narrative may lead us either to more open, entangled, ecological ways of understanding the world, or to re-circling our wagons of self-perception. Similarly, as we shall see in the chapters to come, throughout the nineteenth century, the novel serves at

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once to help weave anxiety-suppressing fantasies into the larger cultural mythology, to reveal how such weaving takes place, and to suggest alternatives to these narratives. Fears regarding sufficiency and closure develop in concert with the ascendance of the individual and the nation as central figures, as well as the juridical sensibility that supports and depends upon these. As early as Mansfield Park, we will see that a pre-thermodynamic notion of energy attaches to concerns regarding the impossibility of sustaining either the family or the nation as a closed system. Jane Eyre while re-inscribing myths of independence of self and nation nonetheless suggests alternative ways of inhabiting the systems it reveals as having never been closed. By the time we come to Great Expectations, we will find an almost explicit exploration of the systematic ways in which narratives are created, sustained and closed, knowingly or otherwise, by those invested in them. The novel opens up for scrutiny these techniques of what I will call “toxic obfuscation”—the narrative strategies that obscure both human complicity in environmental degradation and the disparities by which one individual/nation/species may escape the Malthusian trap at the expense of the other. Finally, The War of the Worlds stages an ecological catastrophe that at its base is driven by thermodynamic necessity. At the same time, Wells parodies the rather ineffective narratives through which we shape our response to such catastrophe, even as he suggests alternative models of self-conception. We must, however, work with these texts if they are to give up these ecologically hopeful readings. Like any living form, the novel is an expression “of a running interaction with wider conditions, including other creatures” (Griffiths VLC 301), its own histories, and ourselves. We thus embark on a project of experimental reading to see what the novel can become and what it can help us make of ourselves.

CHAPTER 4

Experimental Reading

Our interpretive choices matter considerably in how we understand the world. In Darwin’s work and in that of his contemporaries in physics, we have seen that scientific discourse is itself an act of, and subject to, interpretation. The ways that these early ecological sciences frame their understandings of the world are bound up with larger cultural expectations, fears, hopes, and beliefs. In turn, what science means to us depends critically on how we read it. We have seen in Chap. 3 something of how even the tensions between these two nascent ecological sciences depend critically on different interpretations of a shared underlying principle of uniformity. And we have seen how differences on some points may propagate forward. Another Darwin, in some other part of the multiverse, may have embraced the principles of energy science as enthusiastically as he incorporated the observations of so many other naturalists, tempering, in turn, over-enthusiastic interpretations of evolution as progress. Similarly, we can imagine that some other Joule, less persuaded of God’s role in a contained and conservative universe, might have contributed to a formulation of thermodynamics less focused on closure and more on a potentially infinite succession of energy transformations that ties everything to everything else. And while none of the imaginary, alternative formulations that I am suggesting run counter to the robust principles established by

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. J. Gold, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68604-8_4

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nineteenth-century physics or biology, the worldview they foster depends greatly on what they emphasize, minimize, exclude, include or presume. These emphases are shaped by the discursive culture in which the formulation of energy principles takes place. As we shall see in the chapters to come, how we read the energy we find in the natural world is informed by the energy we have read in novels. And even where such emphases may have run counter to the more ecological interpretations we now seek, we may see in novels the power of metaphorical and analogical thinking to shape—and potentially reshape—our view of the world. The nineteenth-century novel may seem a funny place to attempt such reshaping. On the face of it, it doesn’t seem to be all that sensitive to ecological concerns. It tends to be set in cities and houses. It features and is the effect of the culture of industry that drives and is driven by our increasing use of fossil fuels. It focuses quite emphatically on human social interactions, manifesting what may seem an intractable anthropocentrism. It often fixates on an individual at the center of a closed system. It seems to understand nature as the stable background against which we move or the untouched, pristine, originary other against which we define our fallen selves. It camouflages dependence on both human and nonhuman others, not least for infusions of energy in innumerable forms, especially food, fuel and work. And it is suspect for its tendency to project human fears, doubts, frustrations, anxieties, hopes, aspirations, and so on onto the natural world, for remaking it in our image, rather than understanding it for its essential like and unlikeness. What, for example, might we make of lighting striking an old chestnut tree, other than the rather obvious fact that Jane Eyre has agreed to a marriage under some rather dubious circumstances? And if the novel, as suggested above, is implicated in our desire for closure as well as a rather unproductive nostalgia, the novels of the nineteenth century lead the pack: where else can you so reliably find a happy ending, or at least a sense of completion, finality, and closure? At the same time, the very processes by which the novel anxiously constructs its illusions of closure may tell us what alternatives are precluded, as well as what is at stake in the choice of competing narratives. Thus, each of the chapters that follows foregrounds a different system that the novel struggles without success to close: the family in Mansfield Park, the individual in Jane Eyre, the nation in Great Expectations, and the planet and species in The War of the Worlds. Two of these novels precede the consolidation of the principles of energy physics and the laws of thermodynamics, and two follow it. Even as these readings are intended to stand alone for

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those who wish to read them as such, their trajectory is intended to give a picture of the mutual shaping of literary and scientific notions of energy and its various forms and affordances including work, movement, growth. Each purportedly closed system, as we shall see, not only reveals its dependence on, but also operates as synecdoche for the others, from which it cannot be disentangled in thought or fact. These readings thus suggest how the history of energy is entangled with a wider drive to closure, even as the concept of energy suggests alternative models for thinking systems. In the chapters that follow, I conduct a series of literary experiments developed to foster a variety of ecological reading practices for fans of nineteenth-century literature. These are essays, in the etymologically laden sense of trying something. Each reading experiment investigates the consequences of applying a range of willfully ecological lenses to a familiar text, and each insists on the importance of science and especially energy concepts to any appropriately Victorian ecocriticism. As the presumption of closure is a huge bar to more ecological ways of thinking, all of these readings will interrogate the construction and failure of closure within the novel’s various systems. We will work to develop experimental ways of reading that reconceive the system—its nominal closure, its boundaries and its centers, the relations among its constituents, its entanglements with other systems, and the verbal strategies we use to make sense of it. To do so, we will revisit energy science with a view to highlighting some of its under-sung implications for alternative ways of thinking the world. It is my belief that a thermodynamic understanding of energy, including a “literary” understanding of classical thermodynamics that makes explicit its implications, assumptions, and emphases, brings to the fore certain persistent aspects of ecological and anti-ecological thinking that still dog our attempts to do better. Note that these experiments are not finished; if it were not a necessary condition for publication, I would probably never stop writing this book. As with our pictures of energy exchange, interpretation itself is always provisional and incomplete. It has its own kind of punctuated equilibrium, evolving in fits and starts according to the needs of the moment. In this way, it is like science. It is like ecology. Nonetheless, a few patterns have emerged in my experiments to date—concerns that drive some or all of these readings. I expect that most of these point to necessary, though not sufficient, strategies for more ecological ways of reading, thinking, and being. Some of these patterns are energetic-extensions of more traditional concerns of ecocriticism: for example, anthropocentrism, as I have

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suggested, depends on the same predilection for pre-existing bounded units that dominates our science. The forms attached to energy may reinforce or resist this predilection, depending on how we choose to deploy them. Other strategies that emerge in these readings require that we put energy and its formal affordances at the center of our reading. Among these are the need to understand ecology as relevant everywhere (city, country, suburb, etc.), the need to think beyond traditional boundaries of place and notions of closure, to understand nature as (like) us, not “merely” metaphorically but bound to us in relations of energy exchange and similarly subject to its principles. To this end, it helps to relegate the human to the margins for a change, to explore how our vexed self-images have shaped our understanding of the natural world, to forego expectations of closure and stability, to resist nostalgia, and indeed, to resist holding too firmly to any single perspective. To let things be messy and open and possible, and to read as if our world depended on it.

An Unperfected Recipe for Reading Novel Ecologies Trouble “Nature”; Presume Not Innocent It has long been clear that “nature” is a particularly vexed term. As we saw in the prologue, numerous thinkers have warned against an oversimplified or overly nostalgic view of “nature,” among them John Stuart Mill, Raymond Williams, Donna Haraway, and Timothy Morton. Our notions of nature reflect our own hopes, dreams, aspirations, beliefs, predilections, and so on. In turn, notions of an innocent or untouched our even virgin nature underscore some of our most intractable views of nature as the stable background against which we act. We will see in Jane Eyre that “nature” is already under scrutiny in ways that attach to “energy” in its pre-thermodynamic formulation. But energy, as we currently understand it, could, perhaps should, underlie a vision of nature as always-already changed and changing. Energy moves us away from the notion that nature should be innocent. Energy is never originary. It has always been something somewhere, and it is always going to be something somewhere.1 Energy implies that nature has a history. We may intervene, arbitrarily assigning a beginning to the 1  Even theories of the big bang presume a radical change in the form rather than in the existence of energy.

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energy transformations we hope to observe or shape, but we also need to recognize that these beginnings are provisional, as is any form that energy takes in any given moment. The rock may seem to start at the top of the hill (see Chap. 2), but there remains a history of how it got there that we simply have decided not to consider. Our ideas about energy are similarly not innocent. They are, as discussed above, deeply implicated in the ecologically problematic assumptions discussed above, especially an overwhelming drive to closure As I have suggested above, however, the novel, like energy and nature, need not be innocent to command our attention. Indeed, an ongoing sense of how the novel has been part of the historical developments that made the mess can help us to avoid the kind of modern primitivism that may make us long for these supposedly more innocent times. It may help us avoid the reflex that underscores both the romanticizing and the rape of so-called virgin territory. The novel can help us to resist the nostalgia that seeks pristine nature as if such a thing were possible. Indeed, the novel may be just the place to explore the possibilities that it has helped to foreclose and the energies, the resources, the work it has helped to obscure. It may even help us unpack the processes by which we have foreclosed them. We will thus be taking it to the “rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty” London streets of Great Expectations (129), to ask how and why such a place can be represented as being and having the best of everything, and what are the effects of doing so. The novel is, after all, rife with ambivalence as well as anxiety—at least, the really good ones are. Arguably, the deeper these go, the more they touch on our most fundamental, unexamined premises, many of them forms of the drive for closure. And the same literature that seems designed to soothe our anxieties can help us face our fears. It endures precisely because it produces a problematic pleasure: for better or worse, it couldn’t do its cultural work if it didn’t. But the endurance and effectiveness of these stories also make them ripe for analysis and constructive rereading. Be Wary of Scarcity and Closure Be wary of narratives of scarcity and presumptions of closure, especially where these are proffered as natural, for they may be very real illusions. Scarcity may be a construct that obscures uneven distribution of resources, mystifying the energies that produce the very power a narrative may serve. Perceptions of scarcity can obscure and heighten inequities in access to

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necessities and obscure human responsibility for these inequities. At the same time, these narratives of scarcity may ultimately reveal these energies as well as the rhetorical strategies that mystify them. Every text here—perhaps every story ever told—wrestles with some problem of scarcity, real or imagined, anticipated, feared. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Austen establishes a pattern that keeps remaking itself in narratives both fictional and scientific. Well-mannered but nonetheless Malthusian populations struggle for limited resources: the population of Bennet sisters may be said to exceed the demand that the number of eligible gentlemen can supply. And the mother of Fanny Price, Mrs. Fanny Price, is plagued with “such a superfluity of children, and such a want of almost everything else” (MP 6). But these narratives of scarcity may depend as much on the distribution of resources as on any fundamental lack. Scarcity depends on perspective and its deployment: which girls may marry and whom, which children will be fed, who is inside or outside the system that is perceived as in want. Such narratives of scarcity, moreover, attach to “energy” even before thermodynamics embraces it as a physical concept. These energies and resources may manifest as a social problem—as in the frightful energies of Austen’s Henry and Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park. Alternatively, anxieties regarding resources are converted into monetary form—as Brontë’s Bertha Mason and Dickens’s Abel Magwitch provide secret support of the “independent” English man. Sometimes fiction will even grapple more directly with physical energy and ecosystems, as the planetary depletion of Wells’s Mars motivates the conquest of earth and our rethinking of our presumptions regarding both our planet and our species. In all cases, we see how perceived scarcity is met with efforts to bring in energy from someone or somewhere else—often while obscuring the source of such imports. In turn, such efforts concentrate available resources within what is perceived as the system, amplifying its drive to a thermodynamically impossible closure. Energy, both before and after it becomes thermodynamic, thus suggests the inevitability of dependence on something external to ourselves. Denying or obscuring this dependence then becomes a preoccupation of narrative, resulting in an overwhelming drive for closure. I use the term “closure” broadly to imply a kind of systemic definition that distinguishes inside from outside, self from other, x from not-x, in all its variants. Such cherished notions as independence and self-sufficiency depend on such delineations. So does the notion of the individual, and the concept of the

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human. But from a biological or physical viewpoint, closure—in the sense of energetic isolation from everything outside the system—is rare indeed, and impossible for living systems that wish to remain so. Physical impossibility, however, does not hinder ongoing fantasies of independence and self-sufficiency, and increasing energetic awareness may well heighten the anxieties that drive those fantasies. The illusions of closure, so carefully maintained in Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, and Great Expectations are violently shattered at the outset of The War of the Worlds—two sides of the same anxiety. Thus, my ongoing interest in how nineteenth-century novels wrestle with the concepts associated with energy physics are subsumed within (or perhaps, vice versa) concerns regarding ecosystems, and its attendant anxieties about scarcity, depletion, sustainability, resource independence, closure, and the place of humanity in nature. Follow the Energy As narratives of scarcity or closure can obscure the actual flow of resources, so too can “energy” as it persists in its colloquial (pre-thermodynamic) form. We have seen, for example, how Darwin’s continued usage of energy as a quality of personal or national character can undermine a better understanding about the source and limitations of energy resources. Moreover, certain requirements of manners, patriotism, human-exceptionalism, and so on serve to mystify the source of the energy/resources for which we struggle or believe we struggle. But with a concerted attention to narratives of scarcity, these mechanisms of mystification become available for examination. Following the energy is one way to resist this drive to closure. Because all physical interactions are effectively processes of energy exchange, following the energy means following the flow of resources, both those we generally understand as energy sources, such as coal or petroleum, and those we do not, such as food and work and the products of human and animal effort. Fortunately, we are not without experience in thus following the energy. In many cases, energy narratives are the familiar political narratives (gender, class, race, colonial…) from another point of view. When we unveil the source of Pip’s expectations or ponder the efforts made to keep Thornfield in constant but wasteful readiness for Rochester’s rare and unexpected visits, we are following the energy—so too, when we recall the plight of the dodo or gape at a Martian making a meal of our fellow humans. And we follow the energy when we investigate

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the “silence of the Bertrams” attendant upon Fanny Price’s now famous inquiry regarding the slave trade (Southam). The omnipresence of energy makes our presumptions about it paramount in shaping our worldviews. We have seen how the constraint of closure in the laws of thermodynamics is implicated in our ubiquitous predilection for closed systems—and vice versa. But revisiting energy as a form can also help us to reframe our sense of what it means to inhabit an ecosystem—or rather, innumerable nested or entangled ecosystems whose boundaries are always provisional, historical, mobile, and permeable. Energy may then be conceived as a form, or as the intersection of forms, in the broad sense identified by Caroline Levine: “Form, for our purposes, will mean all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference” (3). Energy is such an ordering principle; it is a patterning that shapes the behavior of matter at every scale from the subatomic to the universal. And, like any such pattern, it lays claim to a variety of potentialities or affordances—potential uses that may be active or latent (Forms 6). Our thinking about energy has emphasized three of energy’s affordances: conservation, dissipation, and closure. But, as we have seen, these emphases arise from the social and historical conditions in (conversation with) which we have come to understand energy in the physical world. Natural laws may be universal, but our emphases and interpretations are accidents of history. We might then ask how, within the bounds of an overwhelming scientific consensus, we may nonetheless revisit our sense of what energy means. Like any form, energy helps “shape what it is possible to think, say, and do in a given context” (Forms 5). What then does the energy concept offer that we have hitherto deemphasized? What does it afford? To begin to answer this question, it is worth revisiting various aspects of energy that are, or could be, as important to our worldview as the big three have been. Among these are perpetual transformation, a history that exceeds our perception, application to all systems at every scale, and radical entanglement. Pursue Entanglement at Every Scale As we open up our sense of energy to embrace its under-sung affordances, it serves as a thread that connects the organisms whose relations ecosystems theory exhorts us to study. Each text considered here may thus be considered an ecosystem, full of many such, nested among many others, and all bound in relations of energetic exchange. As each work wrestles

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with the prospect of decay of what it imagines (hopes?) are closed energetic systems, we see that its many constitutive and neighboring systems are not closed at all, but rather entangled with a host of others. Further, the current state of any of these systems proves provisional, merely a snapshot in the series of transformations that are life and time. Our inability to isolate meaning, to divorce the organism from his/her/its/their environment, or to distinguish the one from the many, the impossibility of independence and the problematics of national boundaries, all point to a growing sense that entanglement is inevitable, universal, and desirable. Entanglement is also always energetic, as systems connect to each other through the exchange of energy in its manifold forms—heat, light, motion, sound, food, labor, fuel, and more. The universality of this list suggests that the provisional suppression of entanglement has uses—as do the temporary suppression of feasible meanings as discussed above (see Prologue). Pursuing too many in a novel can lose readers as fast as Herman Melville’s cetology. But we can slow down and read Moby Dick, and we can pursue implicit connectedness wherever we find it in less manifestly ecological texts. This strategy borrows a good deal from new historicist criticism, which pursues such implications as they are suggestive regarding cultural and historical contexts. Why not add energetic contexts to that list? It also borrows a great deal from Darwin, whose contemplation of an “entangled bank” and the complex dependence of such widely varied forms on one another (Origin 303) has inspired ecological thinking in so many. And while Darwin opines that we shall probably never fully “disentangle the inextricable web of the affinities” between the members of any related group of living beings (Origin 269), even less between beings radically different in form, the pursuit of such connectivity moves us away from illusions of closure or stability in nature and in the novel. Fostering a sense of connectedness—pursuing the apparent tangents that the novel does not seem to require us to pursue—is another way to resist the sense that a novel, an individual, a nation is a closed system. To this end, we will pursue the source of apricots in Mansfield Park, reflect on the nurturing of typhus in Jane Eyre as well as its tacit disinterest in the plight of caged birds, identify the critical role of mosquitos in Great Expectations, and tease out the implications of a nascent immunobiology in The War of the Worlds. And as we thus move outward, beyond the kitchen at Mansfield Parsonage or a churchyard in the marsh country to the centuries of global

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expansion and domestic development that created them as such, we begin to think beyond the scales of time and space apparently delineated by the novel itself. Such multiscale interdependence is already inherent in Darwin’s conviction that “the dependency of one organic being on another, as of a parasite on its prey, lies generally between beings remote in the scale of nature” (Origin 52). Further, the few laws that he outlines—growth, reproduction, increase, variability—govern the evolution of smallest and the largest of living beings. The laws of energy comprehend even these, governing the subatomic and the universal and everything in between, and insisting on the connectedness of energy processes in the creation of life, the universe, and everything since the big bang. Thus, energetic entanglement reminds us that what we can observe is partial and provisional and connected to something much larger whose intricacies we may never disentangle. But in seeking out entanglements previously foreclosed, we return abundance for scarcity, movement for fixity, connection for exclusivity. Multiply and Move Perspectives So that entanglements don’t simply become appropriations, it is important to keep in mind the perspectives of the others with whom we are entangled. Any picture of an energetic system focuses on some conversions of energy at the expense of others. The apparently stable perspective that creates this as figure and that as ground, or this as actor and that as environment, may elide ecological interdependence. Indeed, as we shall see throughout our texts, such a perspective frequently serves the pursuit of what we know to be an impossible and unsustainable energy independence. From a different angle of view, that which seemed like a source of energy (the hero, the nation, etc.) is shown also to be a sink, for its energy came from elsewhere. Shifting and multiplying perspectives reminds us that such assignments (figure/ground, actor/environment, energy source/sink) are always provisional, temporary. Nonetheless, we need some perspective. To have none at all is to flirt with madness (Morton ET 30). But it needn’t place humanity (or any of its subsets) at the center and it needn’t be fixed. All of the works considered here—including Darwin’s and Joule’s—may be thought of as playing with perspective. From Austen’s free indirect discourse (which enables us to compare alternate ways of inhabiting the same, simultaneous ecology) through the bifurcated first persons of Jane Eyre and Pip (which enable

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the adult to critique the nostalgia of the child), the nineteenth-century novel experiments with, and encourages us to experiment with considering familiar things from a multiplicity of perspectives. Unfortunately, the novel seems so intent upon the entanglements of its human inhabitants, that it seems to exclude a perspective that would accommodate our entanglement with nonhuman lives. John MacNeill Miller thus finds the Victorian novel “notoriously resistant to ecocritical analysis” in spite of a “paradigmatic strategy of tracing material connections across class and geography to emphasize the shared interests of all members of the community” that is, paradoxically, proto-ecological (157). If, however, we take our cue from ecosystems theory and consider “all relations among organisms” are, at some level, the “material exchange of energy” (qtd in Parham GMH 258), we can resist our own tendency to assume that perspectives must be attached to humans or even individuals. As we work to wrap our brains around all of the fundamentally energetic exchanges that make our lives possible, we also resist the anthropocentrism that seems one of the most intractable challenges to ecological thought. The War of the Worlds is exemplary in this respect. Manifestly concerned with energetic entanglement on an interplanetary scale, Wells’s narration fosters a multiplication and mobility of perspective—inclusive, interspecies, ecological. Flip the Metaphor Timothy Morton looks forward to a time when we will “be accustomed to wondering what any text says about the environment even if no animals or trees or mountains appear in it” (ET 21). How to do so does not seem immediately clear. As suggested above, pursuing apparently tangential, energetic entanglements may be one way. Flipping the metaphor may be another. What can we learn from considering the family at Mansfield a metaphor for an energetically closed system, or from treating Jane Eyre as a metaphor for the caged bird? We have already begun to see how the forms of the novel are the forms of an ecology: its illusion of closure, the complex networks within, the multiple entanglements it suggests. The forms of the literary have also been, as we have seen, key to fostering scientific understandings of the natural world. Through analogy or metaphor, we may comprehend what is strange in nature by working through what is familiar in ourselves and our productions: Boltzmann’s chemical kitchen, Joule’s likening the animal to the best contrived steam-engine,

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Darwin’s conviction that every production of nature, like every great mechanical invention, is the summation of a long history (see Chap. 3). In a novel, we are perhaps more accustomed to the metaphor working the other way. Nonhumans retain a powerful presence in our metaphors. On the one hand, we use them to understand ourselves—a rhetorical usurpation that may be said to ground a more material one. On the other hand, such connections may be a thread we can pull to reveal our greater entanglements. And we can work to level the proverbial field. After all, if there is no real nature in a novel, it is worth noting that there are no real people there either. Every apparent person is as much a literary device, a metaphor, a tool for thinking about stuff, as its floral and faunal counterparts. While we may have a harder time discerning the entanglement of likeness and unlikeness that makes for metaphor, our dance is as problematically and productively representational as any daffodil’s. And without forgetting that real humans exist in the real world, we can nonetheless read those we find in novels as models, metaphor, or metonymy for the larger we that makes up our world of living organisms. Flipping the metaphor, turning aside from reading “nature” as it serves us, artistically or otherwise, may enable us to discover what the “people” in literature tell us about how we understand (or fail to understand) ourselves and the world that we inhabit. As we shall see in Mansfield Park, Jane Austen certainly details various microclimates (and their inhabitants), and attending to these is an important part of reading that ecology. But the ecology she details most thoroughly concerns the system of human inhabitants, and this one can tell us much about how the concerns of individual, familial, and national self-conception diffuse into what will be the concerns of a nascent ecosystems theory. On a smaller scale, a single metaphor can tell us much about what a text avoids considering in pursuit of its primary goals. Thus Jane Eyre’s proud pronouncement, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will” (216), may be reread for what its plea for feminist independence may elide, starting with a potentially problematic attitude toward birds. You Do You How we treat each other cannot be separated from our treatment of the natural world. The attention to ecosystems is not intended (as some manifestations of deep ecology or biocentrism might seem to be) to displace or subordinate our caring for humans and human concerns. The fact that

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Jane Eyre’s feminist manifesto is entangled with presumptions of human mastery over other humans and over nonhuman nature does not lessen its importance, though it does change its impact. Even decentered, we remain an important part of the ecosystems that we inhabit or that inhabit us, and concerns cannot be disentangled. The position known as eco-feminism highlights such interconnectedness, addressing the “paradoxical act of sadistic admiration” (Morton EWN 3) that plagues a women-nature thus isolated, even in worship. As multiplying perspectives, shifting figure and ground, flipping the metaphor, and so on, serve to reveal relations that discourse may otherwise elide, they are fully compatible with and indebted to other modes of productive rereading—especially feminist, Marxist, post-colonial and anti-racist readings of these texts. From the perspective of energy exchange, all such work serves to make visible those energies (resources, labor, and potential) that are suppressed or elided by dominant exclusionary narratives. Certainly, our familiar feminist and post-colonial readings of the Victorian novel are both enhanced and troubled by attention to other parts of the ecosystems they evoke. The cooperation of microorganisms that establishes Jane’s Malthusian fitness at Lowood or the application of energy principles to Bertha’s narrative may reveal the slipperiness of distinctions that posit one character as a heroine while largely disregarding the fate of others or that treat some as resources, others as consumers. But what happens if we resist the individualistic and anthropocentric perspectives that even our dominant critical narratives may help foster? What happens if we borrow from such narratives the techniques that foreground hitherto marginalized people in order to foreground our hitherto marginalizing and oppressing attitudes toward other inhabitants of the natural world? Alternately, how might revisiting the ways we inhabit the whole of a novel ecology serve the interests of all such marginalized inhabitants? What happens if we read Jane Eyre, for example, less as the story of the struggles of an individual set against a background of challenging environments, but rather as the interactions among a variety of elements in a constantly changing ecosystem? In turn, an eco-centric reading of that bildungsroman par excellence, Great Expectations, reveals not only the toxic penetrations that make “getting a living… in that universal struggle” (9) so challenging in the marshes of Pip’s childhood, but also the discursive work that obscures the actual flow of resources and environmental toxicity, between marshes and metropolis, England and its empire. And if we understand H.G. Wells’s Martians not merely as a political metaphor,

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but also as staging an ecological catastrophe, the Martians come to look like our own techno-imperial doppelgangers, effecting climate change with the introduction of new species and the destruction of others. The repeatedly unsettled perspective of Wells’s third person narrator may come to seem less a failure to flesh out the main character (a critique frequently leveled at science fiction), and more a tour-de-force example of what the nineteenth-century novel can be about. As readers, we can work to occupy different perspectives and recognize different subjectivities in each novel’s ecology. And if we embrace this moveable worldview, our neighbors—terran and Martian, fictional and real—may teach us a great deal about how we must dwell on this planet, neither pristine nor stable, but the only home we have.

CHAPTER 5

Austen’s Emergent Energies: Mansfield Park

By the late nineteenth century, it is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that the British are the most energetic of nations. When Darwin observes in the Descent of Man that “the remarkable success of the English as colonists, compared to other European nations, [can be] ascribed to their ‘daring and persistent energy’” (179), he does more to illustrate a commonplace of nineteenth-century British imperialist politics than to make any cogent point about evolution by natural selection, let alone its relation to the new science of energy. Such commonplaces have profound effects on how we inhabit our world. Indeed, the ambiguity of “energy” proliferates in late Victorian fiction.1 It is not just that some people get the physics wrong, but that most people get it wrong some of the time—or that they use it in metaphorical ways contrary to scientific uses. Frequently, and often without intending to, they do so in ways that serve some (species, races, nations, genders) and harm others. What’s more, even science may be shaped in part by such problematic beliefs. As we have seen, Darwin misrepresents energy in ways that reflect Victorian beliefs about gender, race, and nation (see Chap. 3). In turn, Darwin’s influence has been huge, not only in the practice of biology, but also in the widespread Darwinistic thinking undergirding capitalism itself. 1   See especially Allen MacDuffie, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. J. Gold, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68604-8_5

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Darwin, however, by no means initiates these problematic beliefs. Nor is the energy concept or the struggle for survival the first or only representation that shapes our relationship to the natural world. The concept of nature, and its apparent opposition to something like culture, is increasingly under scrutiny by modern ecocritics, not least for its potential effects on how we inhabit the earth. But we are not the first to be so troubled, and such scrutiny may be as old as the anthropocene. And if the Victorians were its first inhabitants, “the first to dwell within it as a condition of their existence” (Taylor “Where” 878), the Romantic era nonetheless witnessed the shift. Environmental problems became more severe with the growth of industry and increase of urban populations. People began to consider the possibility of species extinction, especially as Malthusian ideas suggested that humans were not immune to this possibility (Hutchings 175–6). And literature appeared to celebrate nonhuman nature not only as an antidote to “the crass world of getting and spending,” but also as a counter to the anthropocentric instrumentalism characteristic of Enlightenment philosophy (Hutchings 172, 180). Not a Romantic per se, Jane Austen nonetheless thought about all of this. Mansfield Park examines both Enlightenment attitudes toward nature and the Romantic response, finding neither adequate. The novel explores how such attitudes manifest themselves in the minutiae of daily life, suggesting how concerns large and small, domestic and international, may shape scientific ideas still to come. The following chapter, therefore, will have two parts. First, I will explore the various ways in which Mansfield Park explores the concept of nature or the natural, revealing assumptions that were already evident in Austen’s moment and troubling some of our most pervasive narratives of closure—the dualistic (subject/object, culture/nature, etc.) and individualistic thinking that suffuses our Enlightenment legacy. This section provides an opportunity for the reader to pursue some of the entanglements suggested by some of the text’s natural objects—apricots, oak trees, and the so-called wilderness—revealing the underlying chains of what we can call (but Austen could not) energy exchange, as well as the ways these may be narratively obscured. In the second part of this chapter, I will explore the ways Mansfield Park reveals the seeds of what will blossom among the Victorians in close association with the emergence of energy principles: first, a pervasive if suppressed anxiety of scarcity; second, a profound ambivalence regarding

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closure; and third, the habits of circumlocution that will dominate the Victorian discourses of energy, enabling a host of misrepresentations regarding the direction in which resources flow.

Part 1: Nature’s Entanglements Mansfield Park is the most Victorian of Austen’s novels. Her groundbreaking albeit brief narrative of the traumas of the 9-year-old Fanny Price anticipates the fixation on the Victorian child that gives us Great Expectations. And though Charlotte Brontë may well have balked at the comparison, the comparative indigence of Fanny’s family, her removal to live as poor cousin-companion in the house of her wealthy relatives, along with the novel’s suppressed narrative of both dependence on and denial of colonial resources brings Mansfield Park closely in line with Jane Eyre. Mansfield Park figures for George Levine as transitional, between natural theological and Victorian positivist ways of knowing the natural world— retaining the former’s concern for the symbolic significance of the landscape while insisting, like the latter, on a scientific objectivity predicated on emotional detachment. (63-43) As we shall see, both perspectives sustain a worldview that suppresses certain processes of energetic exchange— of work—drawing un-physical boundaries around the system thus constituted and unevenly distributing the benefits of the work that sustains it. This elision is often associated with Fanny’s inquiry regarding the slave trade, which produces an uncomfortable but prolific silence among the Bertrams. This wide-scale suppression of slave labor in the colonies, along with that of female bodies at home, is writ small in the general disregard for Fanny’s own labor. In turn, this disregard and Fanny’s associated isolation is fostered in part by her own Romantic attitudes toward nature. Romantic Nature Fanny Price herself repeatedly expresses a relation to nature that is conspicuously Romantic. Though Edmund stands beside her, admiring the “brilliancy of an unclouded night, and the contrast of the deep shade of the woods,” finding it “all that was solemn, and soothing, and lovely,” she alone appreciates it enough to forgo what Wordsworth would deem the lesser pleasures of society:

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“Here’s harmony!” said she; “here’s repose! Here’s what may leave all painting and all music behind, and what poetry only can attempt to describe! Here’s what may tranquillise every care, and lift the heart to rapture! When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.” (80 sic)

Fanny is undoubtedly a Romantic production when it comes to nature. She manifests some of the characteristics that Wordsworth famously admired in his rural subjects: she is, in her “rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse […] less under the influence of social vanity” (Wordsworth 290) than those around her. And like the poet himself, she is “endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness [with] a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind” (Wordsworth 300). In preferring a comparatively unmediated response to nature, in subordinating action to feeling, and in idealizing the natural world and counting on its capacity to elevate the human mind and human morals, Fanny seems a good representative of a Romantic sensibility. Her wish that “people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene” (80), also suggests that cultivating a relationship with the natural world could, in association with such a sensibility, contribute to a less bounded notion of the individual. It is perhaps paradoxical that Fanny’s Romantic sensibility should so thoroughly isolate her. The freedom from social vanity that Wordsworth identifies is at best a silver lining in rural life, at worst a distraction from the difficult work under frequently harsh conditions that often obtain there. In a slightly different way, Fanny’s appreciation of nature reconciles her to her own, largely unacknowledged, place in the energetic economy of Mansfield Park. Nature consoles Fanny for her disappointing relations with other human beings. Even Edmund votes with his feet for singing glees instead of stargazing on the lawn, leaving Fanny “sigh[ing] alone at the window” (81). Similarly, her observations on the road to Sotherton are prompted by the fact that “she was not often invited to join in the conversation of the others, nor did she desire it.” (58). This, however, seems rather like sour grapes. While it may be that “her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions” (58), it seems likely that this was because she could get no others. Humans have proven

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unsatisfactory companions, and nature seems to function as a consolation prize. Thus, if we are in a critical mood, we could find Fanny’s Romantic approach to nature less laudable (and less lauded) than it at first appears. Indeed, we might find in Mansfield Park a subtle critique akin to one which has been applied to Wordsworth himself—that is, that what matters in his treatment of nature is finally the human and that Romanticizing nature actually serves to distance the natural world. As such, Fanny seems to treat nature as a resource in the way Wordsworth may be said to have done with his famous daffodils, which similarly accompany him when he is alone (see Chap. 1). The novel itself, however, takes a step back, potentially critiquing the Romanticized view of nature even as it wrestles with a number of key questions regarding the relation between humanity and the natural world, including Enlightenment attitudes regarding human dominion and nature’s utility (see Hutchings), which are so thoroughly implicated in the move, across the last two centuries, to our present energy-guzzling lifestyles. Of all the characters populating the novel, Miss Crawford provides the most reliable contrast to Fanny’s appreciation of nonhuman nature. Her social vanity is repeatedly set against “Fanny’s delicacy of taste, of mind, of feeling,” which consists in large part of Fanny’s Romantic appreciation of the rural life (58). Miss Crawford’s failure to appreciate this life as well as her ignorance of rural labor, may be seen early in our acquaintance, as she struggles to hire a cart to transport her harp from Northampton and is disappointed in her belief “that everything to be got with money” (43). This “true London maxim” evokes a larger, even imperial insensitivity to place and the work that sustains it. On the road to Sotherton, Miss Crawford’s inattention to the natural world is explicitly set in opposition to Fanny’s very different perspective. Once more distinguished as the most sensitive observer of nature, Fanny is able to find much to admire and indeed much that is different in the new microclimate: “In observing the appearance of the country, the bearings of the roads, the difference of soil, the state of the harvest, the cottages, the cattle, the children, she found entertainment that could only have been heightened by having Edmund to speak to of what she felt” (58). That Fanny’s pleasure derives not only from the natural, but also from the cultivated and even human aspects of the country, from not only the soil but also the cattle, the harvest, the roads and the cottages, suggests a potential indistinction between the natural and cultural to which we will return. Meanwhile, what stands out profoundly is Miss Crawford’s decided

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indifference to all (except, of course, Edmund) in which Fanny finds joy: “she saw nature, inanimate nature, with little observation; her attention was all for men and women, her talents for the light and lively” (58). And so we find in Miss Crawford much that Wordsworth would call “social vanity,” as well as what we might call “anthropocentrism.” Miss Crawford places humans in general and herself in particular at the center of her worldview and its corresponding narratives. In doing so, she reflects a larger tendency toward (white, privileged, Western) anthropocentrism and its associated suppression of both the natural resources and human energies that will be fostered by the growth of industry, the metropolis, the empire and the novel itself, to which we will return in later chapters. Mary Crawford’s tendency to anthropocentrism further suggests a good deal about how narrative may contribute to the bait and switch that turns attention away from the energies of the natural world and the work of the laboring classes. She understands the shrubbery at Mansfield Parsonage to be a sign of social success, which she had not expected a country parson ever to achieve. But neither the shrubbery, nor the laurel, nor the evergreen, nor even the soil, nor the labor that goes into creating them, is of particular interest to her, serving merely as the setting that evokes her surprise that she has spent five quiet but nonetheless happy months at Mansfield, as she declares that she sees “no wonder in this shrubbery equal to seeing [her]self in it” (144). Mary’s moment of self-­ authorship evokes in miniature the ecologically problematic structure of the novel itself—that tendency to understand nonhuman nature merely as the stable environment within/against which the human protagonist(s) act(s). Nor, Austen implies, is the novel the first mode of storytelling to thus create the environment-as-background. Mary’s self-centering is enabled and reflected as she adapts to herself a familiar story, comparing herself to “The famous Doge at the court of Lewis XIV” (144 sic). The shrubbery, it seems, now substitutes for the Palace of Versailles—a site whose gardens loudly proclaim a desire for mastery over nature and its ordering by culture, a site whose very magnificence masks, even as it attests to, the untold hours of human labor and huge networks of energy exchange that foster its apparent tranquility. This same shrubbery inspires Fanny quite differently, as we discover that her capacity to rhapsodize over nature is far from exhausted. The shrubbery impresses her not only by what it suggests about Mrs. Grant’s “quiet simplicity” of taste and, by implication, character, but also by what it suggests about the natural world. Responding once again to the subtle

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differences in microclimates, the growth of the laurels and the evergreens confirms for her what she has been told by her uncle’s gardener—that the soil at the Parsonage is better even than that of the Park, a mere half-mile away. It is the evergreen, however, to which she directs her rapture: The evergreen! How beautiful, how welcome, how wonderful the evergreen! When one thinks of it, how astonishing a variety of nature! In some countries we know the tree that sheds its leaf is the variety, but that does not make it less amazing that the same soil and the same sun should nurture plants differing in the first rule and law of their existence. (144)

Moving from trees to the particular tree to the vastness of sun and soil and laws of nature, Fanny lets “the commonest natural production … [provide] food for a rambling fancy” (144). Rather than the objectivity of Victorian positivism, Fanny seems here to anticipate Darwinian wonder at the “infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and … infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits … advantageous to them” (Origin 83). Certainly, Darwin would be a more interesting interlocutor to Fanny than Miss Crawford. Fanny would no doubt welcome Darwin’s reciprocal amazement that plants differing in what she calls “the first rule and law of their existence” can also be crossed with one another: “Annual and perennial plants, deciduous and evergreen trees, plants inhabiting different stations and fitted for extremely different climates, can often be crossed with ease” (MP 144, Origin 162). But Fanny’s rambling fancy, though she cannot know it, is also a meditation on the manifold ways in which natural systems manage the exchange of energy: Deciduous trees employ relatively fragile leaves in order to more effectively gather solar energy during the summer, but this renders them dependent on nutrient-rich soil for the tremendous amounts of energy needed to regrow them every year. The hard, tough leaves or needles of the evergreen collect sunlight less efficiently, but the tree itself may depend less on the quality of the soil for its survival. That the local evergreens have chosen (so to speak) this strategy for energy exchange further opens the systems under comparison. Better perhaps at the Parsonage than at the Park, the soil at Mansfield is likely less good (and the climate, more harsh) than those countries in which “the tree that sheds its leaf is the variety.” In turn, the predominance of the evergreen in English shrubbery in English landscaping and even its characteristic hedges may be

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motivated by the same climatic challenges that help drive the expansion of the British empire, the slave trade, the industrial revolution. That’s a lot to claim for a plant that hardly qualifies as a tree, but the capacity to see not only the natural systems before us, but the larger systems they imply and with which they are ultimately entangled, is a key competency that energetic reading helps develop. It intersects, moreover, with readings of Mansfield Park that draw out the Bertram’s implications in a system of global expansion and domination, notably in the currently controversial slave trade,2 as does Fanny’s work under the relatively hot sun of Mansfield’s flower garden. Unlike the comparatively robust evergreens, the rose bushes preferred by English gardeners generally require a great deal of human energy to thrive (not least because few roses are indigenous to England and many of the preferred varieties are hybrids). Some of that labor, at least, falls to Fanny who cuts roses while her Aunt Norris sits in the shade and delivers them to ensure her aunt’s later enjoyment of them. As Fanny is thus isolated, her labor is elided and her benefits are disproportionately reduced. But Fanny’s labor announces itself in a headache that launches a discussion that makes it visible. And the extent to which this labor under a hot sun may metonymically evoke the labor done under the hotter Antiguan sun, suggests an intersection of feminist, anti-­ racist and ecological readings of the novel. The Taste of Apricots Repeatedly staging debates over humanity’s relation to nonhuman nature, Austen suggests a variety of ways in which we might value natural objects, none of which proves entirely without its ecological problems. The overdetermined fruit of a single apricot tree serves to suggest the proliferation of values that at once depend upon and serve to obscure the energies— both labor and resources—needed to bring such a tree first to England and then to Mansfield. Neither Mrs. Norris nor Dr. Grant comes off well in their tiff over the apricot tree planted against the stable wall. Mrs. Norris’s assertion that it “is now grown such a noble tree, and getting to such perfection” is already troubling, coming as it does at the end of one of Mrs. Norris’s now familiar self-aggrandizing narratives, typical of her preference for anything that 2  For a discussion of the ways Mansfield Park serves as a “quasi-allegory of colonial-gender relations,” see especially Ferguson.

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proceeds from her own planning. But this fast-growing, self-­pollinating tree hardly needs Mrs. Norris or anyone’s help, and even Dr. Grant concedes that “the tree thrives well, beyond a doubt,” giving due credit to the quality of the soil (40). Rapidly dismissing considerations of the tree’s well-being, however, Dr. Grant evaluates the tree based strictly on its utility, complaining that he “never pass[es] it without regretting that the fruit should be so little worth the trouble of gathering” and insisting throughout that “a good apricot is eatable, which none from my garden are” (40). While Mrs. Norris seems concerned—albeit obliquely and disingenuously—with the possibility of controlling and perfecting Nature, Dr. Grant performs an Enlightenment tendency to understand nature primarily as useful. But value and even utility can take a variety of forms, and Mrs. Norris scrambles to locate the value of the natural object firmly in the market, insisting that the tree “is a Moor Park,” because it was “bought …as a Moor Park,” confirmed by the fact that “it cost us—that is, it was a present from Sir Thomas, but I saw the bill—and I know it cost seven shillings, and was charged as a Moor Park.” (40), to which Dr. Grant insists that she was “imposed on.” At this point Mrs. Grant steps in and settles the argument, though not the question. Indeed, she claims Dr. Grant’s (if not our own) ignorance of the true nature of the apricot, assuring Mrs. Norris in a stage whisper “that Dr. Grant hardly knows what the natural taste of our apricot is: he is scarcely ever indulged with one,” and implying that nature requires our help, reiterating that their apricot is “so valuable a fruit; with a little assistance” that their cook gets them all (40, italics mine). This “little assistance” strikes me as both diplomatic and highly suggestive. Not only does it reconcile Mrs. Norris’s and Dr. Grant’s assessments of the apricots, it also places the value of the apricot somewhere between its inherent qualities and its human reception. Moreover, it suggests a history, a series of entanglements—all of which require the input of energy into the system that grows, cultivates, transports, preserves, cooks, and consumes apricots. This history troubles any easy distinction between what is inherent and what is (human) made, even as it reveals some of the unacknowledged energies involved. Where, after all, does assistance begin? The fuzzless Moorpark apricot is, as Dr. Grant suggests, supposed to be quite yummy right off the tree, but perhaps these apricots are so only after they are assisted into the “early tarts and preserves” for which the cook covets them. Or is it that only those with the best natural taste will serve for the cook’s subsequent art? Either way, Dr. Grant hasn’t a chance at knowing the fruit’s natural taste.

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What’s more, a “little” assistance might camouflage not only the taste, but also the great deal of assistance that goes into obscuring the origin of this particular apricot. Perhaps it is a tree from Moor Park, the Hertfordshire home of the late Admiral Lord Anson; perhaps it’s not. In either case, the apricot did not originate in Hertfordshire. More likely, it originated in Armenia or China, where it had long been cultivated, and where George Anson made several visits (as well as a fortune) after a disastrous voyage around the world in the conflict with Spain known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear.3 I do not know whether Commander Anson picked up any apricot-­ growing tips while selling his spoils in Macao, but his circa-1760 development of the Moorpark variety is credited with being the “greatest growing breakthrough” in the history of the English apricot.4 In any case, it takes only a moment of exploration to suggest that considerable energies— human as well as solar and chemical and thermal—have been expended to bring any such taste to Dr. Grant’s rather fussy palate. In turn, this framework of energy exchange highlights the impossibility of ever identifying the “natural taste” of this or any other fruit. Mrs. Grant is more right than she intends. As the argument at the Parsonage obscures the string of associative, assistive, and historical connections necessary to create the “natural taste” of the Moorpark apricot, it reinforces a misleading conception of nature. As Timothy Morton puts it, “Nature [is] a transcendental term in a material mask,” not a material thing at all, but a metaphor that we use to signify a (generally, unarticulated) list of related things, a metonymic series: “fish, grass, mountain air, chimpanzees, love, soda water, freedom of choice, heterosexuality, free markets…Nature” (EWN 14). His list evokes multiple aspects of our conception of Nature, including the ways it is more and less overtly politicized, prized, and priced (14). It includes the material as well as the immaterial, the nonhuman and the constructed, apricots and admirals. And while, as Morton suggests, “the idea of nature is getting in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art” (1), everything in his metonymic series can be understood as bound by innumerable processes of energetic exchange; what we think is natural cannot be separated from questions of utility, origin, assistance, taste, value, and so on—questions that will in time become explicitly thermodynamic.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Anson_1st_Baron_Anson  https://www.tr eesofantiquity.com/index.php?main_page=product_info& products_id=157 3 4

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The Natural Look Writing several decades before the advent of thermodynamics, Austen does not have an energy concept with which to insist on the scientific reality of the entanglements that produce what we call nature. Nonetheless, she is very much invested in the way power and history and aesthetics do so. In England at this moment, taste has turned from the energy-intensive, highly stylized topiaries and parterres of classic French formal gardening, to a more natural, though equally energy-intensive, look developed according to the principles of the picturesque. While Austen frequently pokes fun at the picturesque, she seems ultimately to admire it. Indeed, one of the key characteristics that separates the perennially adored Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice from the comparably witty Mary Crawford is her appreciation of “natural” beauty. Even if we find Elizabeth’s raptures—“What are young men to rocks and mountains?” (186)—a bit over the top, her discernment is a reliable guide to ours. This discernment separates Elizabeth Bennet from Fanny Price as well, for Fanny’s resistance to improvements does not denote a commitment to the natural or even to a natural appearance, so much as a pervasive conservatism that irks many a reader, in spite of its occasionally conservationist manifestations. She wishes to preserve the avenue of oaks at Sotherton, but an avenue is by no means a natural arrangement, but rather an extremely traditional feature of landscape gardening, which Mr. Rushworth is quite right to think that “Repton, or anybody of that sort, would certainly have … down” (41).5 For all that Austen may participate in her moment’s predilection for the picturesque, she is fully alive to the amount of work that goes into the construction of the natural look. Among the landed gentry of Mansfield and its environs, actual labor and resources are implied in the wealth required to make improvements. Mr. Rushworth’s twelve thousand a year, though wholly inadequate to enhancing his intellect, will enable him to 5  Humphry Repton himself concedes that “the love of order, of unity, of antiquity, greatness of parts” may be somewhat gratified by a stately avenue, but he is quite clear that this does not make up for its various inconveniences, such as its wind-tunnel effects and its mindnumbing sameness (25). Worse still, “it will often act as a curtain drawn across to exclude what is infinitely more interesting than any row of trees” (26)—”the [improved] scenery of the country and [the advantageous] display [of] its native beauties” (3). It is precisely the more natural and picturesque look that Repton seeks to gain by the removal of an avenue such as the one Fanny wishes to preserve. But Repton’s pursuits suggest that pursuing the natural is itself a kind of nostalgia, an aesthetic preference for nonhuman nature as organized in certain landscapes in preference to others.

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improve Sotherton to his heart’s content. By contrast, Edmund does not anticipate that he will be able to do much at Thornton Lacey. And of course, Fanny’s mere wish to see the avenue at Sotherton will have no influence at all. Austen thus suggests that one’s financial resources not only denote one’s access to natural resources, but also that wealth may go a long way in producing this season’s determination of what’s natural. Where Henry Crawford’s smaller income—along with Henry’s considerable personal energies—have already produced all the improvements he could wish for at Everingham, Mary’s desire to be far elsewhere while renovations are in progress reiterates a characteristic disinterest in the labors that create a place. And if done well, the picturesque itself obscures the energies necessary to its production and maintenance. Pemberley does not disappoint, and Elizabeth feels that she “had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste” (293). Unfortunately, Lancelot “Capability” Brown’s “improvements” at Moor Park fall short of this ideal, and Horace Walpole, visiting shortly after their completion, complained that Brown had “undulated the horizon in so many artificial mole-­ hills that it is full as unnatural as if it was drawn with a rule & compasses” (324). By the time Austen writes Mansfield Park, Brown’s successor Humphry Repton has folks disturbing avenues all over England in order to temper the course abruptness of the traditional avenue. This aesthetic preference, this insistence on a natural look, also works to obscure the power of those who seek it as well as the labor of those who cultivate it. To replace straight lines of trees with an approach that winds turns out to be, like Sir Thomas’s locutions, a kinder, gentler form of compulsion. It is a means to direct the eye, framing the view of the landscape like the picture in picturesque, because, as Repton says, “the eye of taste or experience hates compulsion” (25). And for all that Repton is the lead “improver” of his day, his concerns bespeak an arguably conservative need to handle a changing political landscape that is shaped by changing economic conditions such as those driving the apocalyptic visions of Thomas Malthus, and still reverberating with the aftershocks of the French Revolution. This taste for the circuitous, as we shall see, also shapes the novel’s pre-thermodynamic discourse of energy.

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But What About the Wilderness? Where the picturesque struggles to obscure the work that goes into producing a natural appearance, the “wilderness” at Sotherton eventually reveals an anxiety about the (im)possibilities of closure. Quite clearly a made environment, the “wilderness” at Sotherton refers to “a planted wood of about two acres … chiefly of larch and laurel, and beech cut down, and … laid out with too much regularity” (65). Referring to this feature of the landscape as the “wilderness” undoubtedly serves to downplay the considerable work that creates and sustains it (along with the terrace walk, the lawn, and the bowling green). But its features belie this misdirection: The wood is planted, and too regularly at that, and neither larch (Larix decidua) nor laurel (Laurus nobilis) is native to England. Larch, a fast-­growing tree primarily used for timber, was introduced to England in the seventeenth century.6 The name of the laurel is quite as evocative of ancient Greece, as the smell of its leaves (also known as bay leaves) is of its Mediterranean origin. The common beech (Fagus sylvatica), on the other hand, is a long-lived tree considered native to southern England and Wales. That the beech trees have been “cut down,” likely for their timber suggests further the history of alteration that has gone into making the “wilderness.” We continue to use the strong timber of the beech tree for a host of applications—from smoking sausages to making flooring and furniture and the rayon fabric modal. And once seasoned, it makes excellent firewood. No doubt it has long served as a status marker for the Rushworths, according to the hierarchy of fuel consumption that Heidi Scott documents so thoroughly.7 Thus, the wilderness at Sotherton refers to something not very wild at all, but rather a portion of the Sotherton estate whose nominal wildness obscures its history of cultivation, including the shifting fuel economy it represents and the disparity of human work and human benefits that accompany it. The wilderness at Sotherton also stages in miniature the novel’s pervasive interest in delimiting systems. The outside that defines the lawn as inside, its boundaries are marked in one location by a flight of steps and at another by an iron gate, generally kept locked. It thus provides Maria with the opportunity to protest “I cannot get out,” likening herself to the caged starling in Laurence Sterne’s tale (71). This literary association 6  https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/visiting-woods/trees-woods-and-wildlife/britishtrees/common-non-native-trees/larch/ 7  See especially her discussion of such status markers within Austen’s work. Fuel 85–94.

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works much like Mary’s framing herself against the background of the shrubbery. And while Maria’s lament clearly refers to her issues with patriarchal authority and anticipated marital constraints, our sensitivity to the ways the wilderness is constructed as such may suggest to us that, when it comes to culture-nature, there is no out. Like the illusory freedom the Bertram daughters experience in their father’s absence, the wilderness represents a nostalgia for what never has been. “In this sense,” as Jesse Oak Taylor puts it, “nature has only ever existed as an absence—the antithesis to rapacious modernity,” (Sky 6), and Austen’s novel is already literature of the anthropocene. Taylor dubs this perpetually elusive aspect of what we call nature, the abnatural.8 This nature may seduce us, as Mr. Crawford does Maria, taunting her with her own hesitation: “And for the world you would not get out without the key and without Mr. Rushworth’s authority and protection.” Fanny makes a final plea for staying in, but Maria insists that there is an out: “Prohibited! nonsense! I certainly can get out that way, and I will” (71). But Maria, as we have seen, does not and cannot step out into the wilderness, but makes her way with Mr. Crawford out of the wilderness and into the park. She cannot find a natural space any more than she can find freedom from patriarchal authority, but moves herself from the kind of constraint represented by Mr. Rushworth, to the illusion of freedom that comes with Mr. Crawford’s more subtle control. These negotiations surrounding the ins and outs of the “wilderness” exemplify Mansfield Park’s larger obsession with delineating the boundaries of systems—social and material. As we will eventually see with energetic and ecosystems, the boundaries of the wilderness prove to be constructs of power and will and convenience. Thus, Mansfield Park can be made to reveal the processes by which our construction of the natural promotes a worldview that obscures real-world work and energy, even as it heightens anxieties regarding scarcity and decay.

8  “Nature in the Anthropocene exists in a state of perpetual withdrawal, a state of affairs that I have taken to calling abnatural. The prefix ab means both ‘away from’ and ‘derive from.’ Thus, ‘abnatural’ speaks to both nature’s absence and its uncanny persistence. While dubbing something ‘unnatural’ solidifies the idea of Nature as a stable entity, abnatural reminds us that what we call nature is replete with exceptions, always eluding definition. Abnatural characterizes those moments in which nature appears other to itself, beside or outside itself. It speaks to the way organisms continue to adapt, mutate, migrate, and evolve, even under artificial conditions. The hot house flowers that abound in Victorian fiction are abnatural; so are gay penguins” (Sky 5).

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Part 2: Before the Victorians Scarcity In spite of a heritage-film tendency to portray a detailed opulence in Regency attire and to linger on the picturesque in its landscapes, Austen’s novels are suffused with perceptions of scarcity, which (as we have seen with Darwin’s) tend to imagine the nation and the family as closed systems. Malthusian populations struggle for limited resources as each novel works through some version of the troubles that plague Mansfield Park. Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters must make do on a limited income. The population of Bennet sisters may be said to exceed the demand that the number of eligible gentlemen can supply. And the Fanny’s mother, Mrs. Fanny Price, is plagued with “such a superfluity of children, and such a want of almost everything else” (6). Supplying these wants is, of course, what leads Mrs. Price to reach outward, sending Fanny to the Bertrams and William out to sea. Such outward movement is absolutely necessary, though not entirely sufficient, to sustaining the Price house. Fanny’s decline on her visit to Portsmouth, the general entropy of the Price household, and even the death of little Mary and the squabbling over her knife, all point to the problematics of sustaining health and order with insufficient resources. At Mansfield Park itself, such problems of resources would seem far off. And at first glance, the lesson Sir Thomas finally learns seems weirdly Malthusian in its terms, as he eventually comes to acknowledge a “consciousness of being born to struggle and endure” (321)—a rather odd conclusion to the events of Mansfield Park, but very Victorian indeed. Still, his revelation seems somewhat less a non sequitur if we consider how Mrs. Price continues to haunt the text, revealing the fine line that separates scarcity from plenty. So much like her sister Lady Bertram—every bit as handsome and similarly soft spoken and indolent—Mrs. Price is the might have been. She represents the condition that Lady Bertram escapes only by a stroke of great good fortune, only by marrying Sir Thomas, whom she is evidently 3000 pounds short of deserving. But although scarcity inhabits Mansfield Park rather differently than it does the Price household in Portsmouth, it is nonetheless pervasive. It is clear that the estate itself cannot be sustained without sufficient profits from the Antiguan estate. Perhaps even more to the point here, productive or useful energy seems as scant as local profits. In Mansfield Park, this

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energy shortage manifests as a social deficiency, a perceived decline in personal energy and usefulness attached to a declining upper class. Such a decline will soon manifest graphically in Great Expectations, in the fading yellow and accumulating cobwebs of Miss Havisham’s wedding attire. For now, Tom’s general dissipation, Mrs. Norris’s unproductive busyness, and the indolence of Lady Bertram, who must be protected not only “from all possible fatigue” but also “from all possible…exertion,” bespeak a pervasive enervation (26). This is not, of course, the kind of energy shortage that plagues the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—a decline in available fuels driven in large part by global politics—but they are not unconnected. The energy anxiety, evident in Mansfield Park, participates in and helps to produce the larger cultural framework that imagines the family, the class, and the nation as self-sustaining closed systems. When Mrs. Price reaches out to her estranged sisters, it is the Bertrams who take Fanny in, but if they have done so to supplement their declining energies, as others will do to supplement their declining funds, they are doomed to disappointment. Fanny is no Bertha Mason, whose money will reinvigorate the declining fortunes of the Rochester family. She is not even a Lizzie Bennet, who will presumably gift Pemberley with both her considerable energies and her middle-class morality. Instead, Fanny’s introduction into the family seems rather to re-emphasize the general decay, as they rely so heavily on the labor of one who is “fatigued and fatigued again,” not least by exerting herself in the heat, in ways that, as I have suggested above, both obscure and reveal the network of invisible labor that goes into sustaining Mansfield. If this novel provides no figure who approaches the emphatic decay of Miss Havisham, it undoubtedly stages the anxiety of inhabiting a system with insufficient resources, both economic and personal. Mansfield Park also points to what will become an energetic truism: a closed system is, of course, subject to inevitable entropic decay. The novel, as George Levine argues, “constructs an ordered and essentially closed system” in the world of Mansfield park, and one, moreover, governed by something like the first law of thermodynamics.9 Its ending may well “replac[e] inferior parts with superior ones” (59)—Edward for Henry, for example—but the novel is forever haunted with the sense that this closure 9  Levine likens the novel’s “system” to “the world of Lavoisier’s chemistry, built in part on the axiom, ‘in natural and artificial processes alike, nothing is lost and nothing is created’” (59).

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comes at the cost of stagnation, decay, and enervation. And the novel’s obsessive negotiations of who (or what) is in or out—from questions of whether the Grants and Crawfords should be counted as within the family circle through Fanny’s questionable status as young female who is not yet out, to the larger questions of the absentee landlord—the novel’s obsessions with the boundaries of the family and the nation bespeak problems that, in advance of thermodynamics, shape the problematics of energy and the closed system. Most notably, the anxiety regarding scarcity within the systems thus posited as closed anticipates the second law of thermodynamics, which promises that in a closed system, entropy will always increase. In any such system, energy will always become less and less usable—unless, of course, the system is opened and energy from outside is brought in. Energy and the Closed System As we have seen from reading Darwin, energy in its pre-thermodynamic sense will continue to hold sway even after the word “energy” takes on its scientific meaning (see Chap. 3). Published decades before scientists began to consolidate the principles of energy science, Mansfield Park nonetheless anticipates some of the troubling ambiguities that will plague energy discourse for the next two centuries. As Mansfield Park suffers its characteristic decay, personal energy arrives in force with the Crawfords: Mary is said to have “the same energy of character” as her brother Henry and claims never to be fatigued except by doing what she does not like (50). Such personal energy, in, say, Elizabeth Bennet, may be understood to revivify the declining upper classes of Pride and Prejudice; and Mr. Darcy’s choice to marry Elizabeth over the sickly Miss DeBourgh, may be said to augur well for such a strategy. But Mansfield Park is more dubious: we are never quite sure how to feel about the Crawfords’ energy. Though they do much to enliven the family circle, we are never sure that we wouldn’t prefer the safety of repose—that we wouldn’t prefer to do without their energies, if “Mr. Crawford would but go away…and take his sister with him” (211). Mansfield Park thus wrestles with energy as a personal quality—a meaning that persists throughout the nineteenth century and later, even as energy takes on its somewhat more precise and even quantifiable physical meanings. This is not “just” a matter of words. The personal quality of energy in Mansfield Park reveals structures that will eventually be central to understanding energy as a physical phenomenon. Energy in Mansfield

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Park operates much as we would expect any other scarce resource. Where that resource is scarce within a system—family, class, nation—it becomes necessary to bring in, or simply let in, energy from outside. For that, however, one must open the system, which as the energetic Crawfords suggest, may be a mixed blessing. The inclusion of Crawfordian energy, indeed, is necessary to forestall fatigue and decay at Mansfield Park, but threatens the shape and values of the system itself. The Crawfords illustrate not only the dangers of bringing outsiders within, but also the difficulties of maintaining the borders that delineate the two. It is perhaps no surprise that upon arriving home from Antigua, Sir Thomas immediately sets about restoring, sustaining, and policing the boundaries of the family circle. Repeatedly expressing his wish for the privacy of his own family circle, Sir Thomas disperses the party, sending “some members of their society…away,” reducing intercourse with the parsonage, “drawing back from intimacies in general” (135). He closes the system as much as possible, tolerating only “the Rushworths [as an] addition to his own domestic circle” (135). But the effects of his attempts at closure are decidedly enervating, as Mansfield becomes “all sameness and gloom…a somber family party rarely enlivened” (135). The Crawford/Grants, however, continue to trouble the distinctions of in and out, as it is their exclusion only that Edmund regrets: “they seem,” in his words, “to belong to us. They seem to be part of ourselves” (135). And though Edmund thinks their inclusion “would enliven us,” Fanny (ever the advocate for closure) believes that her uncle would not welcome any such addition, preferring “the very quietness [and] repose of his own family circle” against the liveliness of all comers (135). Sir Thomas’s obsession with the closure of his own family circle signals a larger and much more elaborate obfuscation of scarcity and need. Within Mansfield Park, the “family circle” is the energetic system that seems to provoke the most anxiety and that certainly receives the most overt attention. It is, however, situated within such dubiously-closed systems as class, society, and nation, and the family serves metonymically as a figure for all of these. The discomfort felt on admitting the Crawfords is akin to the discomfort created by Fanny’s famous inquiry regarding the slave trade. In both cases, some family member seeks to admit what the others would exclude. Fanny, who would admit discussion of the slave trade, would exclude the Crawfords. And though the slave trade is vastly more objectionable, the admission (in both senses) of such a distasteful dependency, like the admission of the Crawfords, would belie a carefully tended illusion

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of closure and self-sufficiency. Such acts of exclusion and enclosure repeat themselves on every scale, manifesting even in Fanny’s paired fantasies of setting up house with her brother William and in the dubiously happy ending in which she marries her cousin Edmund. All reflect a pervasive novelistic concern for the problematics of closure. Circumlocutions In all their various forms, such efforts to enclose obfuscate the origins of the energy and resources needed to sustain the family or the nation or the individual. The details of William’s story establish another obfuscating pattern that we will find reverberating through Rochester’s first marriage, Pip’s expectations, and even the Descent of Man. His is a story that potentially points outward: born, like Fanny, in Portsmouth, “he had been in the Mediterranean; in the West Indies; in the Mediterranean again” (162). He begins, moreover, as a figure of need—one of the superfluity of Price children who must be provided for. And while there can be no doubt that his naval career spells imperial dependence writ small, he is encouraged, unlike Fanny, to talk within the family circle. He does not, however, seem to expound upon the slave trade or any other kind of trade. Instead, his stories, of “every variety of danger which sea and war together could offer,” are taken to be proof of his personal qualities, “proof of good principles, professional knowledge, energy, courage, and cheerfulness, everything that could deserve or promise well” (162). William thus evolves, through the novel, not into an object lesson regarding the impossibility of systemic self-containment, but rather into a figure of home-grown energies nurtured to everyone’s benefit. The creation of such a figure depends on a persistent rhetorical effort. Throughout the novel, there is a great deal more talk about the local work that goes into William than there is of the opportunities and resources provided by his travels abroad. And though most of the influence comes from Sir Thomas or Henry, most of the talk comes from Mrs. Norris. Though childless herself, she loudly bemoans “how much young people cost their friends,” adding “what a sum [the Price children] cost Sir Thomas every year, to say nothing of what I [Mrs. Norris] do for them” (208). She claims, moreover, to have given William on his departure “something rather considerable,” though the numerical amount is far less than the ten-pound gift that Lady Bertram finds merely “enough” (208). Mrs. Norris thus seems the least graceful example of a pervasive

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misrepresentation of the flow of resources. She provides a particularly inelegant version of general patterns of circumlocution—making it all about what she (they) provide rather than about what is brought in from outside. The novel participates in these patterns, directing our attention to the support William gets from those in (or nearly in) the family circle. It focuses on the difficulties of getting William made, a result that exceeds even Sir Thomas’s resources and to which end, even Henry is driven to unusual efforts, which in turn increase his chances of being counted within the family circle through marriage to Fanny. What is less talked about and more imperative, however, is not what we can do for William, but what William can procure for us—what William brings back from his voyages out. On the surface, this doesn’t seem like much; he brings nothing more significant than a cross for his sister and the promise of two shawls for Lady Bertram. But Lady Bertram adds a suggestive caveat: she is ready to commission him (as she puts it) to bring back “anything worth having”— an open-­ended sink for whatever resources can be got (240). On the small scale, then, William reiterates the story of the Antigua estate, but with more success. Perhaps the most important thing William brings back is a better story of imperial relations. His tales serve as a timely counterpoint to Sir Thomas’s, whose very body tells a tale of resources exhausted and barely capable of giving back. He returns from his West Indian voyage having “grown thinner and with the burnt, fagged, worn out look of fatigue and a hot climate” (123). William returns energized, his positive personal properties having been fostered to everyone’s delight. We cannot tell, however, how William got his energy. Did he somehow get it on his travels and bring it home? Or did he have so much energy to begin with, that even his travels in climates hot and enervating could not deprive him of it? Like his stories and his cheerfulness, William’s energy figures as an amorphous resource whose source cannot be traced. And this personal energy—the kind associated with what is often called an individual’s “resources” in Austen—will linger to complicate discourses of energy once energy takes on its scientific significance. By the late nineteenth century, England’s imperial success was widely regarded as a result of its manifold resources including, somewhat amorphously, the national character (see Chap. 3, also MacDuffie VLEEI 116). William’s story seems the best answer to the scarcity of resources and pervasive fatigue that plague Mansfield Park and its environs, but it is only one among many such problematic circumlocutions—among them the “natural taste” of the “Moor Park” apricot, Sir Thomas’s “advice of

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absolute power” (192), the “wilderness” at Southerton, and the almost literally unspeakable slave trade. Austen does not, of course, show how the discourse surrounding energy (as we now think of it) contradicts itself at its most critical points. She does not show how a nation’s claim to be the most energetic and (as Darwin will one day put it) to produce “the greatest number of highly intellectual, energetic, brave, patriotic, and benevolent men” (Descent 180) can obscure the source of a nation’s energy resources and even enable their misuse. Mansfield Park does suggest, however, how social forms may influence the development of scientific thinking. As “energy” is gradually adopted as the dominant scientific term for that thermodynamic, transformable, ever-so-necessary resource, it enters that arena already burdened by anxieties of closure, scarcity, and decay as well as by the habitual circumlocutions used to assuage these. As novels alert us to social forms and the ways these may be shaped (or troubled) by language, they also have the potential to alert us to the deeply ingrained patterns that shape both our scientific ideas and our reception and redeployment of them. The forms, which cut across social institutions, also cut across the boundary between social institutions and our conceptualization of the physical world, especially when wrestling with something as imponderable as the future of energy. As the family circle closes around William and the source of apricots is fixed somewhere in Hertfordshire and Edmund marries his cousin, Mansfield Park plays out the desire to find all we need right here at home, even as it worries about the dubious benefits—perhaps the impossibility—of doing so.

CHAPTER 6

Jane Eyre: From Heroic Energies to Sympathetic Ecologies

(Dis)Closure Among the most memorable figures in Victorian literature, Bertha Rochester broadcasts that which her incarceration seeks to repress. Her story redistributes the concerns of energetic closure that we saw in Mansfield Park. Where Austen’s narrative centers itself on the flow of personal energy—an abstract quality of character largely absent at Mansfield Park, but evident in outsiders such as the Crawfords and to a lesser extent, William Price—Bertha’s incarceration seeks to obscure the real flow of real resources. In this way, her story brings to center what Austen relegates to the margins. Undoubtedly, deeply-rooted (or deeply-buried) anxieties attach to the source of Sir Thomas Bertram’s wealth in his plantations in Antigua. But with Bertha, as is well known, Brontë brings these home as the core secret and driver of the narrative. This backstory begins with Edward Rochester’s father who, wishing neither to divide the property between his sons, nor to allow his Edward (a second son, like Edward Bertram) to be poor, finds himself with insufficient wealth to sustain an increasing population (two sons, after all) in the style to which they’ve become accustomed. And so the young Edward Rochester is sent to the West Indies to sustain a narrative of sufficiency and progress to which the resources of home are inadequate. To do so, he must marry Bertha Mason,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. J. Gold, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68604-8_6

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the only daughter of a wealthy plantation owner. The senior Mr. Rochester thus takes pains to confirm the reality and vastness of Mr. Mason’s possessions, while the next generation works to obscure both the source of the wealth and the perceived scarcity that motivates its acquisition. Thus, ostensibly mad and tucked away in the attic, Edward Rochester’s wife advertises what he hopes to hide: the source of his wealth and the implied inadequacy of the resources of home. But Bertha resists such mystifications. Her assertive presence reveals the limitations and fictions of the system that would build its myths of closure, self-sufficiency, and independence on her erasure. She reveals how Rochester’s “proud independence” depends upon an “illusion of self-containment …built on denying or backgrounding the contributions of subordinated others” (Plumwood 27). Rochester’s unrealized and unrealizable wish to be alone with Jane, especially when he imagines “a quiet island with […] trouble, and danger, and hideous recollections removed from me” (174), is just such an illusion of sustainable self-containment. Bertha challenges such fantasies as, among other considerations, thermodynamically impossible. With a penchant for setting things on fire, Bertha’s narrative bridges the personal energy of the early nineteenth century and the physical energy soon to be defined by thermodynamic theory. In proto-thermodynamic terms, she shows a “virile force” in her struggle with Rochester, so that he can retain mastery only by binding her to a chair (250) and locking her again in her attic. In the chapter that follows, I will explore how numerous subplots within Jane Eyre similarly obscure and reveal the flow of resources—both natural and energetic. The similarity with which the two terms “energy” and “nature” are treated suggests further that we may trouble the novel’s anthropocentric attitudes toward both together. This will entail revisiting the novel’s seductive narrative of heroic independence, so powerfully articulated as Jane aspires to be recognized as a fully-fledged independent individual. But this problematically human- and hero-centric narrative may be made to reveal something more complex, sympathetic and potentially ecological. Jane gestures toward a revised relationship between humans and nonhuman others, one akin to what Val Plumwood calls a “traitorous identity,” which in this context may serve to reveal the unacknowledged energies on which the myths of independence and closure depend.

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Energy and Nature Energies, when they appear in Jane Eyre, inhere, or fail to inhere, within the individual. Jane resolves that if she should go to India with St. John, she will “show him energies he has not yet seen, resources he has never suspected” (345). She finds Rochester’s face not beautiful but “all energy, decision, will” (149) and ultimately sees “such manly energy in his manner” (as well as love and remorse) that she forgives him for everything (255). By contrast, neither Celine nor her lover “possessed energy or wit to belabour [Rochester] soundly” (123). Energy thus indicates an inherent quality of the individual that dictates the kind or amount of effect that person can have. It is the quality of character that enables even a young Jane to protest Mrs. Reed’s treatment, “gather[ing her] energies and launch[ing] them” in a defense of her honesty and a declaration of her dislike of her nominal benefactors (30). It is in “the unflagging energy and unshaken temper” with which she meets his demands that St. John finds in Jane “the complement of the qualities” he seeks (334). It is perhaps no wonder that St. John Rivers covets these energies; he has watched Jane’s “career with interest [and] consider[s her] a specimen of a diligent, orderly, energetic woman” (320). St. John’s association of energy with order, moreover, will strike the thermodynamically-inclined reader as telling, if anachronistic. For with the advent of thermodynamics, we will come to consider the most orderly or least entropic of physical energy to be the most usable. But while we are still in Jane Eyre, energy is personal. It attaches to Jane or Rochester or St. John—not to fuel or to a state of matter. Nonetheless, it is measured in terms of its usefulness and is coveted by the English imperialist—as physical energy soon will be. Thus, even while St. John remains “full of energy,” he reveals his need, or at least his desire, for energies outside of himself. That he covets Jane’s energies obscures a larger kind of energy covetousness to which we will return below, together with the narratives that seek to obscure it, as colonial spaces, the sources of energy resources, are represented instead as an outlet for energies already possessed. At the time of Jane Eyre’s publication, this is not a slippage or elision in the use of the word “energy,” which has not yet taken on its physical significance. When energy does become something that is found in the natural world, however, it is already primed for such misconstruction. It becomes part and parcel of a larger, anthropocentric view of nature evident throughout Jane Eyre. Indeed, like “energy,” which occurs in 27

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times in some variant, the word “nature” is used 91 times in Jane Eyre and rarely in a way that would suggest a set of values, perspectives, agency, or a subject position distinguishable from human desire. Jane herself is forever assessing the nature of others: Mrs. Reed had likely kept her promise to care for Jane “as well as her nature could permit her,” but “it was in her nature to wound me cruelly” (13, 28). Mr. Rochester’s nature is “sudden and headstrong” (133); St. John Rivers’s, “austere and despotic” (349). Blanche Ingram’s “heart [is] barren by nature” (158). And Mrs. Fairfax, “placid tempered [and] kind-natured woman” that she is, assures us that “we can none of us help our nature” (92, 108–9). Thus, energy in Jane Eyre is to be found in the nature of those who can get things done. As our internal natures seem to provide the resources, the energies that we claim come from inside ourselves, external nature colludes with human wishes, moods, and fears to an absurd degree. This rhetorical appropriation—this persistent use of pathetic fallacy—sustains the sense that nature is ours to do with as we please. The flora, the fauna, and the weather are made to seem ultimately about us. Perhaps never more so than when Rochester proposes and “the great horse-chestnut at the bottom of the orchard [is] struck by lightning in the night, and half of it split away” (219). Indeed, when “a brilliant June morning [succeeds] to the tempest of the night,” bringing with it “the breathing of a fresh and fragrant breeze,” Jane attributes this not to the patterns of weather, but rather to nature’s disposition inevitably suiting her own: “Nature must be gladsome when I was so happy”—a claim so far over the top as to make a reader wonder whether some self-satire may not have been intended (219). Whether in the form of a chestnut tree that bursts into flames to signal a decidedly bad life choice or in the repetition of “nature” as that which a human possesses, nature is called upon again and again to express human values and feelings and to serve human needs. Still, the novel as a whole is not as unabashedly romantic as it may first appear. Indeed, it queries the use of “nature” it seems so thoroughly to embrace. And Brontë, if not Jane, may be seen to exhibit what Kate Soper has called a “nature-sceptical” attitude common among literary scholars from the late twentieth century on. Indeed, the term “nature” presents itself for scrutiny on the first page, as Mrs. Reed exhorts Jane to “acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner—something lighter, franker, more natural, as it were” (5, emphasis mine). This paradoxical prescription finds its inverted counterpart soon

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at Lowood school as Mr. Brocklehurst’s discovers a student whose hair, we are told “curls naturally.” “Naturally!” he scolds, “Yes, but we are not to conform to nature” (54), as if nature were indistinguishable from social pressure. Certainly, the natural has often been conflated with both the moral and the immoral, and we frequently are exhorted to act naturally or to avoid doing so. As we still do, the Victorians raised objections to such uses of nature. John Stuart Mill, for one, seems almost to address a Mr. Brocklehurst of his own, when he observes that “conformity to nature, has no connection whatever with right or wrong” (62). Looking backward through Mill, Brontë’s vignettes seem to express a similar concern regarding the disturbing uses to which nature is put in the service of a culture that simultaneously wishes to see itself as natural and is predicated on the expulsion, suppression, and domination of the natural. Jane herself also has such nature-skeptical moments. Indeed, her most explicitly feminist address may be understood to indict the misuse of nature in the cultural assumptions regarding what is natural for women. Chafing at being confined “to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags” and wishing to do more than “custom has pronounced necessary” for her sex, Jane sees these as stifling a nature teeming with energy, silencing the millions of rebellions that “ferment in the masses of life which people earth” (93). Thus Jane, a budding eco-feminist, identifies an opposition between nature and culture even as she deploys it, placing women on the side of suppressed nature and wasted energies, and men, on the side of culture. Culture, of course, has been decidedly kinder to men, those “narrow-minded…more privileged fellow-creatures.” Jane attempts to denaturalize this distinction, claiming a like subjectivity for women, who “feel just as men feel” and suffer from such rigid restraint (93). But herein lies the (perhaps inevitable) paradox: even as Jane attempts to diffuse the stark division of men from women, nature from custom, she nonetheless deploys nature in the service of better custom, implicitly claiming a more inclusive human nature to which women as well as men have access. Humanity persists as a bounded unit even as Jane negotiates its internal boundaries. She has, it seems, learned something from the rhetorical strategies of Mrs. Reed and Mr. Brocklehurst, and it is possible to read her activism, her claims to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, very skeptically indeed.

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Independence and Mastery More troubling still, this more inclusive human nature is exclusive as well. In Jane’s formulation, some “fellow creatures” remain more equal than others, and like her nature, her energies naturalize her right to command and undergird her claims to independence: “Where there is energy to command well enough, obedience never fails” (358), Jane declaims as she declares her independence from St. John. Her declarations of independence, moreover, are consistently made at the expense of the other, natural or social, from which she distances herself. As Jane claims to embrace (her rightful) nature, she also places herself and humanity above and apart from the natural world. To think of Rochester merely as her employer seems to her a “blasphemy against nature” (149), but her claims to equality transcend not only such incidentals as fortune and custom, but also the flesh on which these depend: “I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;—it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal,—as we are!” (216). While perhaps religiously compelling, such claims to transcendence trouble an ecological reading of the text. Even as Jane deploys nature in the service of her arguments, she also denies connections to and dependency on a physical, material, natural world. This denial of her animality and the assertion of her natural rights converge in her declaration of independence from Rochester: “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you” (216). Inspiring indeed, but there remain plenty of real birds ensnared in nets, whose interests are here elided, and whose captivity is naturalized. Jane seems to imply that, though she is not one, birds may be ensnared with her good wishes. We will return below to these birds. Meanwhile, Jane’s “free human being with an independent will” is, of course, the modern, self-contained individual that the nineteenth century novel does so much to establish (see Chap. 2). But Jane’s claim to be such an individual does little to change, and may even work to solidify, the structures of mastery and containment that threaten it. Craving the kind of self-hood she has witnessed in others, Jane expresses her admiration of Rochester’s mastery quite irritatingly often, effectively helping to naturalize his position. When he first arrives at Thornfield, she describes him as “a rill from the outer world” (101), an image that not only suggests the enervative effects of closure, but also highlights his singular freedom and

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suggests his capacity to shape his environment. At the same time, the figure of Rochester-as-rill elides the workings of the real eco- and social systems, the real energies expended to sustain his mastery. Similarly, the “utter loneliness” that Rochester claims to prefer “to the constant attendance of servants” (379) masks a host of constrained and silenced others, whose largely invisible work and unacknowledged produce serve to keep the rooms of Thornfield in constant but (we must assume) wasteful readiness for his sudden and unexpected, though rare visits. Certainly, Rochester’s model of mastery is alluring, because he assigns Jane a privileged place within the system he heads. Exhorting Jane to “be natural with” him as he “find[s] it impossible to be conventional with” her (118), he also obscures his own participation in what he calls “the Lowood constraint.” Like Sir Thomas Bertram’s “advice” and Sir Humphrey Repton’s winding ways, Rochester’s is a gentler form of compulsion; Jane is mastered by love even more thoroughly than by patriarchy. And it ends in the usurpation of her energies, for Jane eventually finds that his “influence … quite mastered me, [taking] my feelings from my own power and fetter[ing] them in his” (118, 149). And though she runs away to avoid his mastery, her quest for independence is based on familiar models and is similarly fraught. Like Rochester’s, Jane’s eventual independence depends upon economics. Eventually, St. John will observe that Jane’s “own fortune will make [her] independent of Society’s aid” (352). It secures her mastery of herself, so that she can assure Rochester that she is “independent, sir, as well as rich: I am my own mistress” (370). Jane’s express wish to be independent of Diana and Mary’s “compassion” as well as St. John’s “charity” effectively creates her own little mythology of self-sufficiency and closure. Like other such myths, Jane’s independence from society and its judgments obscures a larger interdependence. Her newfound individuality depends on the family that she finds in the Riverses and on her uncle, John Eyre, whose death secures her fortune even as it relieves her of any awkward responsibility toward him. Moreover, in an unavoidable echo of the Rochester/Bertha story, Jane’s fortune derives from British-occupied Madeira. Even though an ocean separates Madeira from Jamaica, it is clear from Mr. Mason’s travel itinerary that the one is, literally and figuratively, on the way to the other. But we needn’t wait until the big reveal to see that Jane’s ideas about independence are built on the imperial substrate. Her missionary intentions to preach liberty to the inmates of Rochester’s proposed harem bode ill for the ways her independence will be distinguished and sustained. She

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may taunt Rochester that he should go ahead and buy a seraglio of slaves, if that’s what he fancies (230), but we can see that her fantasies depend much more critically on such a background than his do. Her final threat to extort a singularly liberal “charter” from him resonates with English pride, suggesting strongly that the independence she seeks is built according to Western imperial models, attending not at all to the possible wishes of the imagined women except to follow where Jane leads. In imagination, then, if not in fact, Jane becomes an imperial hero, a feminized St. John Rivers, who claims that her energies derive from within, and that these give her a natural right to command.

Heroic Energies, Imperial Fictions Mythologies regarding the flow of resources abound in Jane Eyre as they do in Victorian culture more broadly; these mythologies shape at once the secrets in the attic and the heroism on the front page. We have seen above how Bertha’s resources at once shore up the image of national self-­ sufficiency, even as her incarceration seeks to obscure this process. Similarly, as advancing technologies increase English dependency on resources from the colonies, the mythology of the independent individual reinforces that of the nation, and vice versa. The West and its representatives are figured as “efficient and full of energy, the tropical regions are inefficient and wasteful” (MacDuffie VLEEI 200). Both, moreover, are based on fictions of energetic closure that enable and haunt identity narratives at every level. Jane Eyre thus anticipates how energy concepts would be misused in the service of empire—its repeated conflation of personal energy with one’s nature sets the stage for the naturalization of imperial power relations. Energy of all sorts will be attributed to the colonizers, in effect, reversing the relations of imperial dependency on colonial resources and rhetorically defying the laws of thermodynamics. But while the dominant narratives of Jane Eyre collude in “obscur[ing] the well-planned systematization of [colonial] exploitation and the rapacity with which it was carried out” (MacDuffie VLEEI 200), the novel also offers a corrective to too-­credulous acceptance of the energetic imperial subject. St. John Rivers is such a mythical figure of native English energy. He has, it seems, too much energy to stay home. India and its inhabitants, human and otherwise, figure as a background against which St. John’s energies will be showcased: “It is in scenes of strife and danger—where courage is proved, and energy exercised, and fortitude tasked—that he will

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speak and move, the leader and superior” (335). Where he goes, he believes, others will follow—perhaps Jane among them. But however unwittingly, Jane’s assessment of St. John reveals how stories of energetic heroism obscure the environmental damage such work can do: A more resolute indefatigable pioneer never wrought amidst rocks and dangers. Firm, faithful, and devoted, full of energy, and zeal, and truth, he labours for his race; he clears their painful way to improvement; he hews down like a giant the prejudices of creed and caste that encumber it. (385)

Like a Christian cowboy, St. John strikes out into hostile environments, clearing the wilderness and creating a better future for those less rugged. But, as Patricia Mckee has argued, figurations such as Jane’s “translat[e] into symbolic action the violent clearing of colonized lands and cultural life” (81). The heroic story of St. John laboring “for his race” elides the damage done to nonhuman nature in the course of European expansion, even as it conflates the interests of the human race with that of the particular race, nation, creed, to which St. John belongs. We wonder for which race he works as well as what else, in addition to prejudices of creed and caste is hewn down. And our focus on the hewing down of prejudices (however dubious) diverts our attention from more material hewing, planting, building, importing and exporting, even as the insistence on the energies he brings to the task obscures the (energy) resources that (are soon to) flow the other way. This is not, as it happens, merely a matter of naiveté. Victorians were aware of the effects of such material hewing and planting. As Heidi Scott has shown, such environmental impact had been observed as early as the sixteenth century, and environmental measures were occasionally recommended, in spite of the fact that “conservation … was a radical action that curbed the profits of natural resource extraction” (Chaos 120–24). When in 1836, Darwin arrived with the Beagle on the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, he bemoaned the predominance of invasive English species and their impact on native flora: It is surprising to behold a vegetation possessing a character decidedly British. The hills are crowned with irregular plantations of Scotch firs; and the sloping banks are thickly scattered over with thickets of gorse, covered with its bright yellow flowers. Weeping-willows are common on the banks of the rivulets, and the hedges are made of the blackberry, producing its

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well-known fruit. When we consider that the number of plants now found on the island is 746, and that out of these fifty-two alone are indigenous species, the rest having been imported, and most of them from England, we see the reason of the British character of the vegetation. (Beagle 341)

Indeed, Darwin expresses surprise that it took so long for invasive species to transform the landscape: goats had been introduced in 1502, but there was a delay of another 220 years before imported animals “change[d] the whole aspect of the island.” By the time Darwin arrived, the recent import of partridges and pheasants had made the island “much too English not to be subject to strict game-laws” in spite of the inconvenience to which the native population have been put for the preservation of partridges. Worse still, the changes that had taken place by “1731, when the evil was complete and irretrievable” had caused the extinction of eight species and a multitude of insects. It seems that in 1836—two years after St. Helena had become a permanent British territory and eleven years before the publication of Jane Eyre—the island had also become much too English for the naturalist’s taste (Beagle 343). For the most part, however, as with St. John Rivers, the giant labors on, hewing and improving without any regrets such as Darwin’s. But Jane Eyre also troubles its own mythology of the indefatigable pioneer and his native English energy. As St. John lays dying, it becomes clear that he is not possessed of the constitution he once attributed to Jane, “both sound and elastic;—better calculated to endure variations of climate than many more robust” (338). Moreover, as “his glorious sun hastens to its setting” we are reminded that neither the missionary nor the nation he serves is truly “indefatigable” or even so “full of energy” as we are encouraged to believe (385). The sun sets even on the British imperialist.

The Price of Independence Jane seems to fare better. Ultimately, she declares her independence from St. John as well, claiming mastery over him and his choice of missionary project. But where his heroic energies lead him abroad, hers take her upstairs: It was my time to assume ascendency. My powers were in play and in force. I told him to forbear question or remark; I desired him to leave me: I must and would be alone. He obeyed at once. Where there is energy to command

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well enough, obedience never fails. I mounted to my chamber; locked myself in. (358)

Thus, also like Rochester, Jane “must and would be alone” (358), securing her independence by ejecting others and literally rising above them by personal energy alone. Her dictum, “where there is energy to command, obedience never fails” is a modified version of “might makes right.” And though “energy” and “powers” and even “force” here are rather moral and personal than physical qualities, they nonetheless establish a pattern that whoever has these resources deserves to command others. Further, Jane completely elides the sources of her own powers. She certainly didn’t have energy to command when she was at death’s (and the Rivers’s) door. The intervening year may suggest to us the numerous resources that undergird this apparently characterological energy. Locking herself in, moreover, constructs the individual as a kind of energetically closed system: As both locker and lockee, subject and object, Jane lays claim to the circular self-mastery that seems to constitute full subjectivity. Able to command others, she becomes her own mistress. At this moment, however, there can be no doubt of the effectiveness of Jane’s powers. But as tempting as such a resolution might be Jane’s ascension is also rather unsettling. Even if Jane does not, her readers experience déjà vu as Jane seeks her own confinement: Here we go again, locked in an upstairs room, and having flashbacks to Jane’s childhood isolation in the Red Room and Bertha’s upstairs incarceration at Thornfield. The novel thus questions the fit of the hero story (to which we will return) as well as the ways we imagine ourselves as individuals. What is this independence that denies interdependence? Must it always imply isolation? Must— can—“I” be alone? Energetically speaking, “I” most certainly cannot. And in securing such an “I”—apart and above—must Jane reproduce the failings, the elisions, of the egocentric and anthropocentric “I” that wishes to close itself off to its dependence on others, the “I” that heroic narrative makes so familiar and so attractive? Feminist writers have long been tempted by such an “I.” In seeking a room of her own as she claims ascendancy, Jane anticipates much of what tempts and troubles Virginia Woolf, who similarly seeks an isolated space on an upper level that commands (so to speak) a view of those below. Whether Woolf intended to critique or to simply claim access to the model of human rights that enables “such freedom of mind, such liberty of person, such confidence” is not consistently clear (Room 99). There can be no

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doubt, however, that she is cognizant of the problems of how such freedom has traditionally been manifested, what that “I” obscures. The “I” appears as “a shadow [that seems] to lie across the page…a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’” (99). The interested reader finds herself “dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether …a tree or a woman walking [we are] not quite sure” (99–100), but in either case, only a small part of what we may call the energetic substrate that supports that “I.” Woolf is attracted, indeed finds a “a sense of physical well-being in the presence of this well-­ nourished, well-educated, free mind,” but as her opening chapters make abundantly clear, physical well-being depends on a host of supportive energies, both physical and personal, on food and warmth and the invisible labor that bring them to the table. Moreover the freedom of this mind that had “never been thwarted or opposed, but had had full liberty from birth to stretch itself in whatever way it liked” evokes a larger imperial substrate: Even as it obscures the energies of the other, the landscape and the trees and the women walking, which are “shapeless as mist” in its shadow (99, 100), it reserves the right to take up as much space and absorb as much energy as it pleases. We may well worry that in securing such an “I” for herself, Jane will not only obscure the landscape, but will also lose the ability that Woolf so admires in women, to “pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her,” to pass a dog, or a piece of land, without the need to master it (50). More than 80 years earlier, Jane Eyre worries about such possibilities as well, querying on the small scale some of the mechanisms, fictions, and erasures that create its enticing fictions of isolated independence at every level. Though a minor character, readily written out of screenplays, Eliza Reed amplifies the novel’s critique of the isolated individual. She exhorts her sister to live “as an independent being ought to do…indebted to no one…seek[ing] no one’s company, conversation, sympathy, [or] forbearance” (201). In doing so, Eliza inadvertently critiques the kind of independent self-sufficiency that tempts us throughout. A microcosm of class privilege and even, at a stretch, colonialism, Eliza’s notion of independence is the outgrowth of her childhood “turn for traffic, and …marked propensity for saving” (24). But her economic prowess is itself a family fiction, in which “the entire household unit of family and servants conspire” (Schlossberg 498). The housekeeper and gardener have orders from Mrs. Reed to buy all that the young Eliza can sell them of the eggs and seeds she acquires from the family stores. This is the lived story that shapes

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the environment of Gateshead and establishes Eliza’s apparent independence from it. But we can see that her “independence,” like Rochester’s, requires the unacknowledged contributions of a host of humans and chickens. The fiction of Eliza’s self-sufficiency is another fiction of closure, establishing an apparently perpetual motion of produce and consumption, and (like the energy Rochester seems to bring to Thornfield) eliding the efforts, energies, and resources of those relegated to the background of its neat picture. Eliza’s claim to independence thus provides a microcosm of the production of the novelistic individual (see Chap. 2). She is, moreover, an individual about whose independence Jane Eyre is overtly skeptical. More subtly, this skepticism redounds on Rochester’s and even Jane’s claims to independence. It is the story, the bildungsroman especially, that places this individual at the center, relegating all of those supporting others to the margin in an effort to create the modern self-enclosed individual. What’s more, Eliza’s tale suggests that at some level this novel knows what narratives it works to foreclose—narratives of chickens and servants alike. For this reason, this novel (and the Novel more broadly) may afford us an opportunity to do what eco-feminist philosopher Val Plumwood exhorts us to do: to exchange the “the ethical stance of closure” for “the ethical stance of openness” (11). For Plumwood, “the ethical stance of closure” is the one that excludes all of the others of Western anthropocentrism, “not only women…but also the slave, the animal, and the barbarian” from full ethical consideration. These abjected others of western culture, are associated “with the body and the whole … sphere of physicality and materiality” (Plumwood 19). We can thus see how such abjection also suppresses the material conditions of all life and all energetic systems. Fictions of self-sufficiency and independence ground our concepts of both the individual and the nation, loudly proclaiming a surfeit of resources and energy, even as they draw on those of the unacknowledged Other.

The Way of the Heroine As imperial discourse belies its own claims to both individual and national self-sufficiency, Bertha’s energies prove explosive. Jane, on the other hand, becomes a neatly trimmed candle, limited in scope and independence, but sustained by the system to which she contributes her energy. Indeed, under-used and under-valued as she is, she seeks an outlet for her energies, fostering the association of work with energy that will eventually become fundamental to thermodynamics. Rochester identifies her body itself as a

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“cage” and a “prison” for “will and energy,” (271). And even St. John, having observed her “unflagging energy and unshaken temper” along with such qualities as docility, disinterestedness, and courage, pronounces her “very heroic” (344). If the novel rejects the uses to which St. John would put her energies, it nonetheless attributes Jane’s eventual “ascendancy,” as we have seen, to her internal energies. The claim that her powers are “in play and in force,” giving her “energy to command” (358) justifies and naturalizes her (moment of) power. And we cheer her on. She is the heroine and deserves to be so. In applauding the rightness of Jane as heroine, however, we not only participate in a problematic ambiguity perpetually connected to the discourse of energy, we also risk the kind of anthropocentrism that shapes what the novelist Ursula Le Guin describes as the hero story. Suggesting that energies simply reside in or emanate indefinitely from an individual or nation is problematic enough while energy remains an aspect of character or morality. But as energy becomes increasingly associated with natural resources and, like work, eventually takes on a specific physical meaning, its affective associations linger, becoming “an ongoing source of misprision and fuzzy thinking about resource consumption” (MacDuffie VLEEI 2). There are, however, subtle suggestions within Jane Eyre of the limitations of its own fantasies of independent energy. For while Jane on the one hand identifies the potential usefulness of her energies for St. John’s imperial project, she objects on the other to her devaluation as mere resource. Though more quietly than Bertha’s, her “energies” figure both as a resource and as appetitive, demanding a sustenance they cannot always get: God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate; and when our energies seem to demand a sustenance they cannot get—when our will strains after a path we may not follow—we need neither starve from inanition, nor stand still in despair: we have but to seek another nourishment for the mind, as strong as the forbidden food it longed to taste—and perhaps purer; and to hew out for the adventurous foot a road as direct and broad as the one Fortune has blocked up against us, if rougher than it. (308 italics mine)

Jane’s measured model of personal energies at once recalls the hewing heroism of St. John Rivers and reveals what it obscures. Jane’s energies demand sustenance; they depend on nourishment from without. And unlike St. John’s, Jane’s hewing explicitly serves to increase that

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nourishment. While she may seem less altruistic that St. John’s nominally working “for his race,” Jane gestures toward a larger system of energy exchange, in which energies are not personal but plural—not “my energies” but “our energies.” In such a system, whether one is a source or sink depends on timing and perspective and the stories we tell. This moment thus suggests a more complex model of energy, resources, sustenance, and appetite. But not without its measure of irritants. In particular, Jane’s “we” may ring disingenuously royal. As all places and all of their elements come to us filtered through her perception, Jane’s “I” looms large. She dominates the story. Although Ursula Le Guin does insist that “the novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story,” she also concedes that “the Hero has frequently taken it over, that being his imperial nature and uncontrollable impulse, to take everything over and run it while making stern degrees and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it” (152). Of course, Jane doesn’t seem much of a killer. And as she dominates the story, she doesn’t present herself as a hero, but far more enticingly as “a free human being with an independent will” (216), just like the rest of “us” whom God has given the power to make our own fate. In this way, Jane Eyre reveals the temptations, inadequacies, and elisions of the heroic narrative that it creates. This story of heroism, then, requires a slight of hand—a textual elision with which the reader colludes—that directs our attention away from everyone else. The center/margin model of the individual and environment seem altogether natural; the rest figures as background. As readers collaborate in this misdirection, we practice what may be called an environmental reading. I should qualify that I do not mean this in the conservationist sense (though, as we shall see below, Jane Eyre participates in Victorian concerns about preserving the environment). Instead, I am using environmental in contradistinction to ecological, following the distinction made by Cheryll Glotfelty, in her introduction to The Environmental Studies Reader (see Prologue). Our habitual environmental reading relegates everything that is not human to the background; it serves as the setting through which we move. We follow the passage of an individual through a series of generally challenging environments, constituted primarily as background and reflection, and devoted to the purpose of foregrounding the heroic fitness of the individual. Such environmental readings ultimately ground our models of (impossible, unsustainable) energy independence, since they effectively say: “ignore the rest of the ecosystem behind the curtain” whence our energies derive.

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As we struggle to read more ecologically, however, we can try to shift our presumptions of what constitutes figure and what, ground. Le Guin suggests that the proper shape of the unheroic novel “might be that of a sack, a bag” in which, admittedly, the hero looks rather like a potato or a rabbit (152–3). The novel, she continues “is a medicine bundle, holding things in powerful, but potentially shifting, relations to each other and to us” (Le Guin 153). Jane Eyre, in this view, can be viewed as a bag filled with human beings, nonhuman nature, chestnut trees and forest dells and typhus, cousins and step mothers, governmental structures and failures of management. All of its “conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc…may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process” (Le Guin 153). If the novel, when not actively taken over by some hero or other, is indeed fundamentally unheroic, perhaps it is not, or not only, a new kind of narrative that is needed, but a more loosely fitting sack-like attention. I am therefore not proffering a properly historicized argument that, based on Victorian contextual imperatives, we should read Jane Eyre as a carrier bag (though once we try, I suspect we will find good reasons for doing so). Instead, I hope we can train ourselves to read our best, beloved, apparently hero-centered texts as well as their paths through frequently hostile environments, with expectations more sack-shaped. I propose that we try to look at a novel such as Jane Eyre, not as the story of an individual moving through a space, but as a system of interconnected elements, of which the individual is but one, whose perspective is privileged, perhaps, but incidentally rather than essentially so. If we do, what will Jane’s movement within such a system tell us about its other elements and the principles that govern interactions among them? Can we imagine a subjectivity less dependent on construing the other as mere object and suppressing the external energies on which it depends? And how do we reconcile the claims of the various elements of the system, the many individuals, groups, subjects, perspectives, with that of the health of the system itself? Paradoxically, Jane Eyre’s tendencies toward anthropo- (gyno?) centricism make the novel an excellent site to develop our capacity “to see humans as ecological and embodied beings” (Plumwood 19). Because of its complicity in fictions of closure and self-sufficiency, the novel works to reveal these as fictions, however compelling. On the one hand, its

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first-­person narration, Jane’s desire for autonomy and independence figured as self-mastery, and the temptations of heroism tend to center and enclose the individual and marginalize the others on which s/he depends. On the other hand, our readings unveil (sub) texts of scarcity, (failures of) closure, elisions of work, and environments that resist objectification. In the rest of this chapter, I will draw on the latter to develop an experimental—and perhaps willfully optimistic—attempt to read Jane Eyre more ecologically. In some ways, this has been the most difficult experiment I have yet conducted; it has been a struggle to read Jane Eyre without presuming a pre-existing, bounded, independent Jane at its center. Nonetheless, this chapter strives to pursue the connections the novel develops between humans and the natural world, even as it creates and sustains the imaginative barriers that separate them. I work to focus on Jane’s (humanity’s?) likenesses to and affinities with nonhuman others—with both spaces and with living beings. In doing so, I will suggest that metaphor has the capacity to connect as well as elide and that we humans may serve equally as vehicle instead of always privileged as tenor. And I will work to understand Jane herself as less central, less of a hero, but rather as an element among others in a variety of ecologies, an important element, perhaps, but neither a central nor an isolated one.

Close to the Borderline Jane, as I have suggested above, has a complex relation to rhetorical “nature.” But even as Mrs. Reed exhorts her to acquire a more “natural” disposition, Jane evinces a deep-seated ambivalence to “real nature,” which at once helps and harms, invites and threatens. Her story, in fact, begins with this impasse—neither in nor out, but in the liminal space of the window seat, where she seeks a “double-retirement” from “the drear November day” that promises to nip the fingers and toes with cold and to humble Jane by evoking her physical inferiority to the Reed children (5–6). Jane thus places herself right up against the border of nature and culture, closure and openness. The clear panes of glass only partially divide her from a nature that she at once desires and fears, “protecting, but not separating her” from the “scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast,” and potentially resisting models of closure, which dominate Rochester’s, Bertha’s and St. John’s story (5–6).

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Having thus beat a retreat from the winter afternoon, Jane somewhat paradoxically seeks another scene—colder, stormier, and drearier than the last: Where the Northern Ocean, in vast Boils round the naked, melancholy isles Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge Pours in among the stormy Hebrides… (qtd in Brontë 6)

As with the wet lawn, Jane faces this scene through a partial barrier. Bewick’s History of British Birds works much like the window pane, connecting Jane to a North Atlantic seascape she has never seen. The text creates another connection-separation, placing a textual barrier-link between Jane and the Hebrides. It would be easy enough to draw upon our own guilt—ivory-tower, urban, technological—to indict Jane for reading about, rather than engaging with real nature. But we are not so cruel to the friendless orphan, and it is clear that her options are limited and her frame slight—more suited, perhaps, to academic than to outdoorsy pursuits. Undoubtedly, Jane appeals to so many readers because she is a reader herself; we see ourselves reflected in her practices and her triumphs. Nor, of course, is this identification limited to her readerly qualities, as is clear from the persistence of her story as a foundational narrative of liberal feminism. But as readers and feminists (separately or together), we may find in Jane’s travails many of our own challenges as well as our triumphs. And in thus seeking a window seat, Jane may well enact the challenges we face both as ecologically concerned academics and as feminists. Unfit for the cold yet intrigued by “the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone” (6), Jane may well seem hypocritical, paradoxical, or youthful in her attitudes toward the natural world. Or perhaps she is merely Victorian. Indeed, Jennifer Fuller reads “Jane’s search for a balance between wildness and safety” as indicative of Victorian attitudes toward a landscape and environment increasingly threatened by industry (163). This search, moreover, reflects a growing need among middle-class Victorians “to preserve a ‘wild’ or ‘natural’ landscape [that] coincides with ideas of liberty and freedom prevalent in the novel” (163, 151). Jane’s travels through environments that are less and less bounded—Gateshead to Lowood to Thorndale to Moor House and finally to Ferndean—signify at once both Jane’s and nature’s increasing freedom from the “misguided human

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boundaries” that constrain both (163). And of course, authors like Brontë did much to help “inspire a love for wild and untamed landscapes” (Fuller 159). Remarkably, Jane finds her happy ending at Ferndean, a spot so “ineligible and insalubrious” that Rochester can find no tenant, so unhealthy a situation that he balks at what he calls the “indirect assassination” of housing Bertha there (366, 256). Thus, Jane’s freedom is naturalized, and it comes at a cost. Jane seeks and finds access to places in both social and natural economies that reject other humans, less privileged or perhaps less fit (more on this below). But the extent to which we find such resolutions troubling is also the extent to which we may revisit her story in the interests of improving our own troubling politics. As readers still turn to Jane for her enticing feminist individualism, it seems that much more important to investigate the uses to which “nature,” like nascent energy concepts, as well as the colonial, racial, and social other, are put in the novel, not least in the production of “a free human being with an independent will.”

Hostile Environments There can be no doubt that Jane Eyre affords us wide scope for environmental reading. Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, and even India all figure as the “scenes of strife and danger,” the background against which our heroine moves, “where courage is proved, and energy exercised” and so on (335). It remains to be seen, however, whether or how we can decenter such readings, considering not just the individual being’s capacity to survive against a background rife with conflict, but also the nature and needs of that environment and even the larger health of the system as a whole. An undeniably heroic beating of odds, Jane’s survival of the typhus epidemic at Lowood seems an exemplary (wo)man versus nature conflict narrative. Her survival at Lowood bespeaks a kind of Malthusian fitness, at once physical and moral, that make her seem quite naturally a heroine. It is, as Linda Schlossberg compellingly argues, “Malthus’s theory of overpopulation and famine writ small,” a particularly disturbing de-­ magnification, in that the narrative “fulfills the terms of the Malthusian doctrine it otherwise seems to critique” (Schlossberg 503, 504). Even more disturbing is the realization that Jane’s freedom, “her unwonted liberty and pleasure” result directly from this crisis, giving her the chance to demonstrate the “heroic fitness” which secures her place in the annals of feminist narration. Her “ultimate survival against Malthus’s terrible

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odds tells us that she is not merely a surplus product, but rather a valuable heroine” (Schlossberg 504). But the number of deaths necessary to Jane’s progress, the predominance of conflict, and the horrifying fact that Jane’s strength “is inversely proportional to that of the dying children” (Schlossberg 503), implicate Jane in the “imperial nature and uncontrollable impulse” of the hero “to take everything over” (Le Guin 152). At the same time, the Lowood sequence reveals a “crisis of ‘nurturance’ on a national scale” (Schlossberg 490), the result of both natural causes and human mismanagement. Lowood reproduces on the microlevel a constructed scarcity that dogs even Darwin, potentially masking a much larger one. Neither Lowood nor the nation is a closed system, and where Darwin’s Malthusian-driven vision often perceives it as such, the typhus at Lowood provides a potential corrective. Miss Temple’s gestures to mitigate the stipulated food shortages at Lowood are no longer necessary, as the illness of so many girls creates an artificial plenty for Jane. More importantly, the changes in management that follow the outbreak suggest that scarcity at Lowood had always-already been the result of Mr. Brocklehurst’s superintendence of the flow of resources across its boundaries. The typhus episode further displays a Tennysonian crisis of faith in a nurturing mother nature, a profound “equivocation in the mother-virgin-­ lover imagery, which is surely expressive of the conflicting feelings that ‘real’ nature has induced in ‘men’” (Soper 105–6). The conflicting feelings surely range from gratitude and a sense of dependence to the fear that Nature will expend her energies elsewhere than in the nurture of humanity. Thus Jane, claiming “no relative but the universal mother, Nature” and leaving Rochester in order to “seek her breast and ask repose” (275), seems foolish to do so. But Jane has been the beneficiary of Nature’s apparently capricious breast. And comforting images of bosom and cradle overlay a more complex picture, suggesting distributions of natural resources less advantageous to humans. Imagery of nurturance and child development persists even as Jane recounts the typhus that kills so many of the inmates of Lowood. Jane recalls that Lowood in the spring seems “a pleasant site for a dwelling… bosomed in hill and wood, and rising from the verge of a stream.” Nature’s nurturance is seemingly redirected, as “that forest-dell, where Lowood lay [becomes] the cradle of fog and fog-­ bred pestilence” (64). Developing in lieu of a human child, the disease itself “quicken[s] with the quickening spring.” Like Jane is often said to do, it “cre[eps] into the Orphan Asylum [and] breath[s] typhus through its crowded schoolroom and dormitory” (64–5). As it does so, it reveals

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the ease with which nature can reshape human institutions, such that “ere May arrived, [it had] transformed the seminary into a hospital” (65). Attention to the dual effects of typhus at Lowood—Jane, the typhus, and the flowers bloom as so many others succumb—is part of a broader sense within the novel that environments work on humans even as humans claim to control them. We may not wish to take nature as a moral guide, but there are circumstances in which we can hardly help but conform to nature’s dictates. Disease kills us whether we like it or not, though the environment—the climate, in the more local sense characteristic of Victorian usage of the word—clearly works differently on different individuals in ways that potentially complicate the heroic and human-centered leanings of the novel. In this way, the novel is Malthusian in the sense identified by John MacNeill Miller who credits Malthus with dealing a “serious blow to human exceptionalism” by depicting “human societies entangled with nonhuman nature” (156–7), in ways that we will eventually understand as energetic. The role of climate in shaping the individual appears primarily in the negative, as part of familiar anxiety that Englishmen traveling to warmer climes will take on the undesirable attributes—frequently a generalized enervation—associated with its natives. This echoes the novel’s larger sense that opening the system of either nation or individual, while necessary to its sustenance, is fraught with the potential to change or weaken the system itself. Thus, Rochester expounds freely on how in the West Indies, he “was physically influenced by the atmosphere and scene,” (262). Rochester describes a fiery night, with “air…like sulphur-steams,” a sea that rumbles like an earthquake—a climate not only as “intemperate,” but also, insofar as it defies fantasies of virgin land and tropical paradise, as “unchaste” as the wife he finds there. Even the moon sets “broad and red, like a hot cannon-ball” (262). Surely, such a moon is implicated in the lunacy that drives him to near-suicide. And the climate that he depicts is as much like “the fanatic’s burning eternity” as any future state meant by this phrase. He further suggests the role of climate in the distinction between his “good race” and those not-so-good, by attributing to Bertha “a pigmy intellect… and …giant propensities.” It is, however, climate that saves him again, as a “wind fresh from Europe” calls him home, promising him rebirth and renaturalization, and the “glorious liberty” with which the Atlantic thunders (263, 260, 261, 263). The Victorian sense that the environment acts on humans even as they act on it, could very well be inspiring if it weren’t so disturbing. Rochester’s explanations evoke familiar

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forms of naturalized racism, and many contemporaries (possibly Jane herself) might have found them compelling regarding his former actions—if not necessarily adequate justification for bigamy. Jane’s prompt departure from Thornfield suggests that she finds insufficient his plea that the climate did it. She does not, however, seem particularly critical of the venture and its larger imperial context. Indeed, as suggested above, it is a similar venture that secures her own financial independence on the death of her uncle John Eyre in Madeira. Nonetheless, Jane Eyre gives us some access to the cost of such ventures, in English-descended lives at least, repeatedly undermining the narrative of native English energy that Bertha’s incarceration, St. John’s aspirations, and Jane’s declamations seek to elide. St. John Rivers will never see England again. Rochester narrowly escapes suicide. Bertha is apparently driven mad. Richard Mason, whose stay in the West Indies marks him as “not precisely foreign, but still not altogether English” (162), returns to England drained of energy and unfit for the “damned cold climate” where he can’t travel a mile without his furred cloak (182). Indeed, it is through his stay in Madeira “to recruit his health” that Jane’s uncle learns of Bertha’s continued existence, though he too soon takes to his sick bed, “from which, considering the nature of his disease—decline— and the stage it has reached, it is unlikely he will ever rise” (251). Whether such a list constitutes a climatic-fit argument against imperialism is dubious, but not impossible. Kathy Alexis Psomiades suggests that such evidence could go either way; she reads Robert Knox’s 1850 The Races of Man, against the monogenic argument of Robert Wallace, to suggest how discourses of environmental fit could be used both to naturalize racism and imperialism, and to argue (though not without racism) against imperialism, in narratives positively revolutionary though equally naturalized (32–6). The polygenic notion that the separate races had separate origins could easily suggest that the Rochesters, who “have been rather a violent than a quiet race in their time,” should not have been in the West Indies in the first place. Nor, perhaps, should Bertha, whose “wholly alien nature” nonetheless has English roots (90, 261). To what extent, then, might Victorian readers have understood Bertha’s madness as driven by an evolutionary (though not yet Darwinian) and energetic (though not yet thermodynamic) lack of fitness for that environment? Meanwhile, it is clear that Jane Eyre reflects a larger, often suppressed, cultural anxiety, that the colonial holdings that serve as the source of wealth may also be a sink for work and wealth and the much-touted bodily energies of the English imperialist.

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Traitorous Energies In comparison to such large-scale imperial aspirations, Jane’s desire for the efficient use of her own powers seems relatively benign. The ascendancy of her powers certainly elides the contributions of others, but her self-­ reflection and sense of herself as a potential resource may well help us to cultivate what Val Plumwood calls a view from both sides. Jane Eyre can be used to help us “adopt multiple perspectives and locations”; it can help us to see more clearly that we are “situated in [a] relationship with the other” and to see this, moreover, “from the perspective of both kinds of lives, the life of the One and the life of the Other” (Plumwood 205). This dual perspective is another corrective to the energy blindness we have already seen. Indeed, there are no absolutes in energetic entanglement. By this, I mean that the role of any substance in processes of energy exchange depends on its relative position in that system. This is clearest with regard to thermal energy, which flows from a hot spot to a cold spot (and can drive an engine in between). But whether a spot is hot or cold depends on what’s nearby, and a source of thermal energy under one configuration could be a sink in another. Said otherwise, what constitutes useful energy depends very much on context. It is perhaps not surprising that Jane thus wishes to be regarded as useful—so much so that she is nearly seduced by St. John’s aspirations for her. Jane thus resists and revamps her early figuration as a “useless thing” at Gateshead. Indeed, as she is peremptorily informed while being strapped to a chair in the Red Room, Jane is “less than a servant, for [she does] nothing for [her] keep” (JE 9). Consistently regarded at Gateshead as a sink for resources of food and labor, when Jane’s energies prove explosive, she and they must be contained. Neither master nor servant, population or sustenance, center or margin, actor or environment, she cannot be incorporated, so she must be ejected. Her reflections on Gateshead, however, suggest a fleeting model of an ecology, in spite of her exclusion from it: I was a discord in Gateshead Hall: I was like nobody there; I had nothing in harmony with Mrs. Reed or her children, or her chosen vassalage. If they did not love me, in fact, as little did I love them. They were not bound to regard with affection a thing that could not sympathise with one amongst them; a heterogeneous thing, opposed to them in temperament, in capacity, in propensities; a useless thing, incapable of serving their interest, or adding to their pleasure; a noxious thing, cherishing the germs of indignation at their treatment, of contempt of their judgment. (12)

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Like typhus at Lowood, Jane is a noxious, germy little thing dangerous to others, perhaps even to the system itself. And it is possible that Jane’s self-­ awareness may help sensitize us to the fact that humans are frequently toxic to the ecologies they inhabit. At the same time, we may understand Jane as the nonhuman other whom the Reeds disavow. For, Jane is marginalized not only as “a noxious thing” but also as a “bad animal,” “a mad cat,” and “a little toad.” (7, 9, 21) Her first-person narration then suggests that these nonhuman others have a perspective that can be represented, however inaccurately. This is in spite of the fact that Jane seems to embrace, at least in part, the division of her little world that places her outside of ethical consideration, as she absolves the Reeds of a responsibility to feel for her. The Reeds’ lack of sympathy is what situates Jane as “opposed to” them. And as little as the Reeds seem to sympathize with Jane, she identifies the incapacity as mutual: her own inability to “sympathise with one amongst them” is at least part of what isolates her as “a thing.” That she holds them “not bound to regard with affection” such an unsympathetic thing reinforces the moral dualism that divides “the world into two sharply contrasting orders” (Plumwood 144). In this microcosm, the Reeds constitute “those privileged beings considered subject to strong forms of ethical concern as ‘humans’ or ‘persons.’” Jane is part of “the remainder, considered beneath any ethical consideration at all and as belonging to an instrumental realm of resources (or…‘property’) available to the privileged group” (Plumwood 144). Nonetheless, Jane’s metaphors of discord and harmony among the Reeds frame the isolation of individual from environment in terms that suggest other ways of seeing the whole. Discord and harmony are terms that suggest systemic health—the mutual and shifting relations between elements of a larger whole. Paradoxically, such a self-perception is not possible without sympathy—a capacity both to occupy the perspective of the other and to allow the other to occupy one’s own. Her “cherishing [of] germs,” moreover, suggests a rethinking of her own position as “a noxious thing.” Germs, whether of disease or of other organisms can indeed be cherished as, at Lowood, typhoid was nourished by the bosom of hill and wood in the cradle of fog. And while I am by no means suggesting a radical embrace of the things that kill us, the connection between Jane and the typhoid can help us develop what Val Plumwood calls “traitorous kinds of

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human identity [that] involve a revised conception of the self and its relation to the non-human other” (Plumwood 205). Such a “traitorous identity” can help us see ourselves as ecological beings by facilitating “a view from both sides” (205). Jane’s retroactive association of herself with disease and things, and the novel’s further association of her with cats and rats and other animals, suggest a perspectival agility that may help us chip away at the boundaries we erect between individual and environment, and between the human and nonhuman elements of an ecology. She is not, of course, a germ or typhus or a noxious thing, but traitorous identities are possible because “the relationship between the oppressed and the ‘traitor’ is not one of identity” (Plumwood 205). The “traitor,” like most people “suffer[s] from some form of oppression within some dominance order or other.” She is able to criticize the group that privileges her, because she feels the parallels between her situation and that of the oppressed. She can see and care about problems that are not identically her own. In this way, Jane’s understanding of Gateshead as an ecology in which she herself is part of the apparently hostile environment also resists the hierarchical distinction between culture and nature. The subjectivity she insists be extended to herself may be similarly extended to the human and nonhuman elements of what we have understood as hostile environments; their very hostility becomes a mode of expression that needs to be heard rather than merely suffered, isolated or suppressed. In Malthusian terms, they become population, rather than mere sustenance.

Sympathetic Ecologies Moreover, by placing the failure of sympathy as the problem at the root of this infrastructure, Jane also reveals the possibility of other relationships between and among beings. Val Plumwood suggests that sympathy itself may be “better understood in terms of a concept of solidarity that is based on an intellectual and emotional grasp of the parallels in the logic of the One and the Other” (205). Said otherwise, sympathy may enable us to understand the other through a kind of analogy—parallels in logic. Can we understand the cat and the rat and the toad and even the typhus, because in some way, they are like Jane? Devin Griffiths finds such an “intersubjective and material” way of understanding sympathy within Silas Marner, and suggests that “sympathy can be revived as a more involved, more ecological experience that we generally give it credit for—a

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materially engaged affect rather than a projective cognition” (VLC 310).1 Sympathies, in this figuration, reflect the mutual effects of the organism and the environment that shapes its growth. Jane’s sense that Gateshead is a hostile environment that suppresses her energies or disavows their usefulness anticipates this sense of sympathy by noting its absence. Her eventual sense of sympathy, however, evokes a wider connectedness grounded in common, material origin; sympathies open the possibility of sensing the energetic entanglements by which we live. When at Thornfield, Jane has a presentiment prior to receiving the news that her aunt is dying, she revisits this question of sympathy between humans and extends the notion to postulate a similar connection between humans and nonhuman nature: Sympathies, I believe, exist (for instance, between far-distant, long-absent, wholly estranged relatives asserting, notwithstanding their alienation, the unity of the source to which each traces his origin) whose workings baffle mortal comprehension. And signs, for aught we know, may be but the sympathies of Nature with man. (187)

As such, sympathies traverse the distance between individuals; they also obscure divisions between human and nonhuman nature, and indeed between the natural and the supernatural. That they do so as sound waves is further suggestive, as sound is the propagation of mechanical energy through (in this case) an invisible medium. The climactic cry “Jane! Jane! Jane!” (357) may also be read climatically. It resonates spiritually, psychologically, and simply as “pure Charlotte Brontë” (Fforde 346). It also may be understood to express a wish for—even a belief in—a connectedness, not only between the humans whom it reunites, but also between these and the others within a system that they all inhabit and constitute. The call of “Jane! Jane! Jane!” resists systemic closure and spatial categorization, subverting distinctions between inhabitant and environment, the what and the where: “Oh God! what is it?” Jane gasps, immediately offering another possibility: “I might have said, ‘Where is it?’ for it did not seem in the room—nor in the 1  Griffiths finds in Eliot’s work the influence of the theory of epigenesis, which “argues that development of living bodies is coordinated by a cascading series of influences, encounters between the developing body and its environment: as each organ develops, it modifies and is modified by the surrounding environment” (308).

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house—nor in the garden; it did not come out of the air—nor from under the earth—nor from overhead” (357). And for a moment, this uncontained environment is credited with subjectivity. This “hills beyond Marsh Glen” undoubtedly reflecting Jane’s own subjectivity, but nonetheless “sen[ding] the answer faintly back—‘Where are you?’” (358). However fleeting this moment, we are primed to read it as baffling, unifying, and real. It is this moment that gives Jane energy to command; it puts her powers in play, enables her ascendancy, and secures her isolation. But for the moment itself, she listens to the landscape, and perhaps it is a moment not merely of projection, but of energetically-engaged sympathy. Jane’s echoing conversation with the hills beyond Marsh Glen ultimately leads her to Ferndean, an apparent energy sink where “sound falls dull and dies unreverberating” but which nonetheless resonates with Jane’s own voice (381). At Ferndean, “ineligible and insalubrious” as it is (366), Jane not only achieves a reproductive success, she also becomes the mediator who connects one human, at least, to the world around him, whose isolation is in turn no longer complete for her efforts. What are we to make of the ambiguously happy ending in which Jane apparently flourishes in an environment formerly depicted as hostile? It may be that Jane has found a “balance between wildness and safety [that] reflects a larger Victorian conservationist impulse to protect nature from misguided human boundaries such as gardens and orchards” (Fuller 163). It may be that the ending belies the initial characterization of Ferndean as a hostile environment. Certainly, it is significant that Ferndean is not an island— not, ultimately, a closed system. And perhaps Jane’s responsibility to help Rochester, who turns literally “sightless eyes to the earth” to see, suggests a promising desire to connect the human to the natural of which it is part—to speak for, without professing to be—nonhuman nature. He saw nature—he saw books through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting into words the effect of field, tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam—of the landscape before us; of the weather round us—and impressing by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye. (384)

Jane’s responsibility to see for another, may contain potential for that “view from both sides” needed to develop the sympathy on which ecological reading practices depend. If we are to oppose the oppressive practices sustained by our “cultural allegiances to the dominance of the human

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species and its bonding against non-humans,” we need to look at ourselves even as we work to see the other as a subject, though one not identical to ourselves.

The Other Side of the Metaphor Such non-identities surround us. In literature, we often call them metaphor, and seeing them from the other side is relatively simple. If we resist subordinating tenor to vehicle, metaphors become decidedly sympathetic. Such a parallel underscores Jane’s temporary self-conception as “noxious” and “thing.” Similarly, Bertha’s characterization as, say, a “tigress” (181) may suggest a form of solidarity with a nonhuman other, as well as (not instead of) an exclusionary move placing her outside the realm of ethical consideration. As we develop ecological reading practice, the latter, more familiar reading makes visible the assumptions that divide the world into human and other; the former suggests inclusion and affiliation between the human and the rest of the natural world. Once we acknowledge the sympathy that might exist between the heroine and the disease that nearly kills her, it will be less uncomfortable to pursue sympathetic relations between humans and nonhumans or to acknowledge the dependence of one on the other. We can revisit the host of metaphors that once seemed so objectionable in order to tease out the roots of why. As we have seen, Jane’s assertion of independence depends on her claiming the rights of the human being, in contradistinction to the animal: “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will” (216). In spite of her denial, however, her comparison to a bird connects her both to humans less privileged than herself, as well as to nonhumans. In his frustrated desire to master Jane, Rochester articulates such connections: Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage—with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it—the savage, beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit— with will and energy, and virtue and purity—that I want: not alone your brittle frame. (271)

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It is tempting to the reader to move quite quickly to the tenor of the metaphor, the enticing image of a defiant I/eye, of the free spirit that is nonetheless “captive” in a body. We have, however, learned to linger on Rochester’s role as conqueror of a “savage, beautiful creature” who won’t stay “inmate” of the “slight prison” of his house, evoking Bertha and all that she loudly implies, among them, the acquisition and suppression of colonial wealth that secures Rochester’s independence. In turn, the bird itself presents us with a paradox—that of a “wild free thing” still in the cage—a wildness that recalls the “wilderness” at Sotherton (see Chap. 5). This image also recalls the early conversation when Rochester exhorts Jane to “be natural with [him]” (118). This “creature” recalls the “curious sort of bird” seen at intervals “through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive [that] were it but free…would soar cloud-high” (118–9). Rochester implies repeatedly that, more or less violently, he has the capacity to free the bird if he would. Rochester’s mastery of Jane is irretrievably connected with his presumed mastery over a natural world that he nonetheless frames as wild and free. The bird thus works at once as synecdoche and metonymy, as well as metaphor; it represents the tamed-wild nature of which it is part. What’s more, its characterization as a “curious sort” evokes the larger colonial mastery that yields such collectables. In turn, Bertha’s repeated characterization as a “wild beast,” deployed to undermine her claims to human (and humane) treatment, may also be read as such a mutual metaphor. If we do so, we make visible some of the assumptions underlying our objections to her dehumanization, in which Rochester, Jane, and the novel itself are all implicated. For if it is Jane’s words that identify Bertha as “some strange wild animal,” it is the novel itself that places her “on all fours,” so that she may eventually be seen as “the clothed hyena [rising] up and [standing] tall on its hind-feet” (250). We may, with good reason, object to this systematic dehumanization of the colonial other or of the powerful, sexualized woman. We may do so similarly, as her brother whimpers that “she worried me like a tigress” (181)—the tigress serving to dismiss Bertha’s violent resistance to her treatment as a merely animal response. But the recurrence of the tiger, and of feline imagery more broadly, also associate Bertha with Jane, who suppresses what Bertha manifests: “one vital struggle with two tigers—jealousy and despair” (159). The multiple metaphor—Jane is like Bertha, who is like a tiger—suggests the already-familiar slipperiness of metaphor. In turn, Bertha’s service as both vehicle and tenor may create a conduit for

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our thinking about the tiger. Thus turned round, the metaphor directs our attention to the tiger, summarily removed from its native space, for which it serves as a metonym—or as a Coleridgean symbol, that is at once a real thing and a representative of the whole of which it is part. What are the costs in energy and labor and lives that dislocate the tiger and keep it contained? Moreover, when this tiger is placed in a cage, one suspects we will find nearby a hyena and an assortment of similarly dislocated curious sorts of birds. Should we wonder if such a tiger bites? I suspect this suggestion may be troubling. Undoubtedly, humans don’t much like being compared to animals, let alone being subordinated to them, even as vehicle to tenor. Nonetheless, where “Victorian social novels stopped short of embracing the models of interspecies thinking available to them” (Miller 156), this may be one way to recuperate such thinking. And perhaps none of us would mind the association so much, if it did not imply a denial of the subjectivity we accord to “a free human being with an independent will” and our relegation to the “instrumental realm of resources” (Plumwood 144). We place animality uncomfortably close to thingness, and we have seen that the young Jane, identified with rats, cats, and toads among the Reeds, is likewise figured as “a useless thing” and “a noxious thing” (12). Interestingly, Bertha is not similarly thinged, but rather continues to walk the boundary between human and animal. Her very animality—her energy, we might say—undermines any such de-vivification. And eventually, after being called a “charge” and a “lunatic” she is finally acknowledged to be “a big woman, in stature almost equalling her husband” (250). As Rochester “master[s] her arms… and [binds] her to a chair” (250), we are thereby reminded of all else that he masters and constrains. If, like the rest of us, Jane Eyre must struggle to sustain such a view from both sides, its sympathetic moments are even more significant. Sympathy, the novel claims, exists within nature, within and between species, and even between humans and nature. We may chuckle at the extremely convenient lightning that splits a chestnut tree simply because Jane has made a poor life choice. Still, we may also find something useful in Jane’s subsequent relationship with the burned tree: a relationship not of empathy or even simple projection, but of sympathy. It does not require that we be (or even hug) the tree, but it allows us to draw on our own experience in feeling for, even like, but not identical to or subsuming, the nonhuman other. Thus, Jane addresses two halves of a split chestnut tree,

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describing their sympathy with each other and with other life, implying her sympathy with them, and perhaps assuming their sympathy with her: You did right to hold fast to each other,” I said: as if the monster-splinters were living things, and could hear me. “I think, scathed as you look, and charred and scorched, there must be a little sense of life in you yet, rising out of that adhesion at the faithful, honest roots: you will never have green leaves more—never more see birds making nests and singing idyls in your boughs; the time of pleasure and love is over with you: but you are not desolate: each of you has a comrade to sympathise with him in his decay. (236)

For a moment, talking to the remains of the tree, we may see life where we assumed there was none, we may find (as Jane does at Ferndean) connection and sympathy where we assumed desolation, and we may develop our potential to hear the other, whether the other speaks as we do or not, and to acknowledge our dependence upon him/her/it/them. Jane’s participation in various social and/or natural ecologies can leave us with a more developed awareness that we cannot distinguish one from the other, that such dualistic thinking impedes our understanding of ourselves as ecological and embedded beings, and that our treatment of the natural world is inseparable from our treatment of each other. It is a hope to which we can certainly hold fast.

CHAPTER 7

Fictions of Closure and Toxic Obfuscation in Great Expectations

Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life; That I, considering everywhere Her secret meaning in her deeds, And finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear. Alfred, Lord Tennyson In Memoriam LIV

If Nature, as Tennyson suggests, is “careless of the single life,” the novel clearly sets out to compensate. Tennyson is dismayed at the wastefulness of Nature—the misdirection of energies that would create forty-­nine seeds only to scatter them without issue. Darwin will recycle such dismay into wonder at Nature’s glorious abundance, the source of the variety and anomaly that allow for natural selection. The novel, especially the bildungsroman, seems to have done its selecting already. Focused on the adventures of the individual, it effectively elides both the unacknowledged energies and the wastefulness of the larger system that support that individual. From the start, Great Expectations is self-consciously the story of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. J. Gold, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68604-8_7

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the one seed, tellingly nicknamed Pip. Like Jane Eyre, he survives a hostile environment that kills off many of his contemporaries: Typhus decimates the undernourished population at the Lowood charity school that Jane attends—a decidedly Malthusian weeding out of the poor population. Most likely, it is malaria that relieves Pip of both parents and five siblings, “Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger [who] were also dead and buried” (9). We thus first meet Pip, the surviving seed, communing with a tombstone and “five little stone lozenges…arranged in a neat row beside [his parents’] grave,” (9). Unlike the change of management at Lowood, Pip’s indebtedness to his dead brothers for his elevation to protagonist does not at first seem to indict any human actors in creating the conditions that bespeak his fitness. Pip’s elevation to gentleman, on the other hand, quite explicitly reveals the external energies needed to lift him. Unlike Jane Eyre’s pervasive claims to personal energies and natural rights, Pip’s ascendance manifestly depends on the labor and suffering of another. In this sense, Pip may best be compared to Rochester. Magwitch is his Bertha—the disavowed source of wealth that creates and sustains the gentleman. And while each novel ultimately extinguishes these energy sources, apparently closing the systems of individual and nation before closing the book, neither does so before exposing the movement of resources that create and sustain that individual and nation. In both cases, the novel’s big reveal is less that of the woman or man behind the curtain, and more that of the impossibility of maintaining the current system without her/him. This dis-closure, moreover, is echoed in the more familiar form of “toxic penetration” that undermines any lingering pastoral fantasies that could have shaped (but don’t) the narrative of life on the marshes. For all the guilt attached to Pip’s failing to adequately value his “home,” the novel disallows any simple binary of country or city or any clear delineation of space. Great Expectations is further fascinated by the social and verbal processes that create and sustain a belief system. Scientifically informed though not explicit about ecological problems of energy and resource distribution, Great Expectations focuses instead on the rhetorical patterns, the discursive mystifications, the production of beliefs and attitudes that support toxic behaviors and obscure human accountability. Drawing from Laurence Buell’s notion of “toxic discourse”—that genre of environmental protest writing that reveals humanity’s role in creating toxic environments—I have come to call these habits of circumlocution “toxic obfuscations.” Thus, while the novel’s “toxic penetrations” reveal the impossibility of

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systemic closure, it also stages the “toxic obfuscations” necessary to make systems appear closed. Dickens suggests just how much effort is required to obscure not only the history of its toxic environments, but also the movement of energies that create its apparently independent and closed systems in the first place. Further, like all strains of ecocentric thinking, Great Expectations “define[s] human identity not as free-standing but in terms of its relationship with the physical environment and/or nonhuman life” (Buell FEC 101). Resisting at every level the free-standing identity model, Great Expectations thus expands the kind of energetic work done in Jane Eyre. Alive to the impossibility of energetic closure, the novel explores the ways that claims of independence and self-sufficiency work to obscure the inescapable thermodynamic facts. As he illustrates the considerable effort needed to sustain such fictions of self-sufficiency, Dickens also suggests the consequences—to person and nation—of holding fast to such beliefs.

Toxic Penetrations: Pip on the Marshes Written in the two years following Darwin’s publication of the Origin of Species, Great Expectations suggests that principles of natural selection may bolster the hero-narrative. In this way, Great Expectations—the bildungsroman par excellence—helps to naturalize the form of the novel itself. We are immediately sensitized to the climatic factors that shape Pip’s experience. The appalling mortality rate evoked by five dead brothers is typical of the marsh country in which Pip grows up, and Pip’s reflection that his brothers “gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle” suggests a Darwinian spin on an all-too familiar phenomenon (9). Universal though the struggle may be, however, it does not follow that all struggle equally or under similar conditions; indeed, evolution by natural selection depends on the fact that they do not. But the failure to succeed in such a struggle need not be laid solely at the feet of such little boys, for whether by nature or culture, they were certainly born into disadvantage. Though only a few miles away from some of the healthiest places in England, the marshes were no place to raise a family (Mann 109). It was well known that infant mortality was extremely high; malaria was rampant. Thus, a very young Pip can readily diagnose the shivering convict: “I think you have got the ague” (20). The “ague”—malaria—moreover, infects not just the man but also the land. The “meshes,” according to Pip, are themselves “dreadful aguish.

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Rheumatic too.” (20). And the Darwinian suggestion of the importance of environment in determining the outcomes of “that universal struggle,” are unavoidable. But whether the marshes constitute a natural environment depends quite critically on how one considers their history. Even as the brothers’ giving up “trying to get a living” evokes an economic failure as well as an evolutionary disadvantage, the dreadful aguishness of the marshes has economic roots. After all, malaria is a tropical disease that had flourished in the marshes since, paradoxically, the Little Ice Age. When Elizabeth I encouraged landlords to drain the marshes, swamps, and fens to create farmland, leaving “the land dotted with pockets of brackish water,” she helped create a habitat for the various mosquito species known as Anopheles maculipennis—the primary vector for the Plasmodium vivax parasite that causes tertiary fever, or malaria. (Mann 108–9). The two or three centuries since Elizabeth’s reign—though a drop in the brackish bucket of evolutionary time scales—are nonetheless long enough to look “universal” to the young Pip. His view of his brothers’ struggle thus inadvertently elides the ecological history that made staying alive so challenging in those parts, even as it inscribes the history of cultivation that creates this apparently natural landscape. In turn, the travails of the one seed and the death of all his brothers mark not only the Malthusian/Darwinian narrative of scarcity and struggle, but these at work in concert with the problem of environmental toxicity effected by human occupation and cultivation of the land. The details of this ecological history may have been outside Dickens’s wheelhouse, but they were nonetheless right up against its walls. Or at least, up against the walls of the workhouse. Dickens was broadly concerned about the connections between environment and health, and eloquent in his depiction of those urban “fever scenes” that depicted the unhealthful living conditions of London’s poor (Smith 178). But in overseeing the publication of Household Words, Dickens was certainly familiar with the stories of Henry Morley, staff specialist in science and medicine, who depicted the rapid spread of malaria, typhus, and cholera, and even suggested the possibilities of its transmission through water or “hand to hand” (Smith 162, 166). And while Great Expectations seems, like the majority of Dickens’s contemporaries, to attribute “ague,” or malaria, to the miasmas of the air rather than to the breeding of mosquitoes, Dickens certainly understood that disease could travel great distances and through contact with other people(s).

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A sense of what Lawrence Buell calls “toxic penetration” abounds in Dickens: the sense that the contamination will inexorably spread, through neighborhoods, communities, the nation, the world (TD 648). John Parham further finds in Dickens, a kind of “social ecology” in which ultimately, human health is reframed as part of the larger problem of ecosystem health (DitC 1). Great Expectations features just the kind of “straight environmental description” that Parham identifies as the first stage of Dickens’s “analysis of the Victorian physical environment” (DitC 11). For example, on his first day in London, Pip wishes to “take a turn in the air” and is encouraged to walk to Smithfield, which to Pip seems a “shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, [which] seemed to stick to [him]” (131). Similarly, the “frowzy mourning of soot and smoke” that wrap Barnard’s Inn, and the “sooty tears” it sheds in the rain, resonate with the kind of environmental description that permeates Bleak House. Indeed Buell identifies Bleak House and Hard Times, as central texts in the tradition of what he calls “toxic discourse” (TD 654–5). And if Pip’s recollections are rather comically presented, we can still see in them traces of “toxic discourse” in Great Expectations as well. Dickens refrains from depicting the dire conditions under which Pip’s little brothers gave up the universal struggle. Nor does he go on to show how human industry is at least partly responsible for the deadly conditions on the marshes. He leaves it largely to the reader to work out the particulars of that environmental toxicity. But, as Lawrence Buell observes, “ecocentric thinking is more like a scattergram than a united front” (FEC 101). If Great Expectations skips the scientific description—according to Parham, the next stage of environmental analysis—we undoubtedly experience a visceral recognition of environmental hazards, and ultimately, “a concern about the impact on human health that mirrored and anticipated the ecosystem health thesis” (DitC 11). And where Great Expectations stops short of direct scientific or even historical modes of analysis regarding the toxic impact of human occupation, it offers us a different kind of ecological insight.

Fictions of Sufficiency If the problem of toxic penetration is rather subtly inscribed in the depiction of the marshes, the problem of thermodynamic closure is quite emphatically canvassed in the case of Miss Havisham, who figures as a cautionary tale and a microcosm of the larger systems of nation and

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empire. In many ways, she is like Bertha Rochester: rejected by a would-be husband interested primarily in her money, she suffers a long-term confinement that ends in flames. But her insistence on her own independence, her rejection of the world and its inhabitants, is even more evocative of Eliza Reed. Indeed, her capacity for self-containment and self-cloistering beats Eliza’s to flinders. But as with the young Eliza’s egg initiative (see Chap. 6), Miss Havisham’s self-sufficiency can be seen as a carefully constructed fiction, inscribed in the name of Satis House itself. The irony of this name is unmistakable. Even Estella, who informs us that “Satis… is Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew, or all three…for enough” doubts the accuracy of the honorific (49). But resonating within the name of “Satis” is another name at the ready—“Stasis House”—for Miss Havisham tries to stop time at the moment of her being jilted. Stasis, however, also turns out to be an impossible fiction, undercut by the forward movement of entropic decay. The stillness itself, Pip observes, accentuates the process of decay: “without this arrest of everything, this standing still of all the pale decayed objects, not even the withered bridal dress on the collapsed form could have looked so like grave-clothes, or the long veil so like a shroud” (52). In this way, Miss Havisham promptly becomes the most vivid picture of entropic decay in the whole Dickens universe. Her housekeeping emphatically depicts the inadvisability of thermodynamic closure. Her final bursting into flames rivals even that of Bleak House’s Mr. Krook, whose spontaneous combustion is said to have been “engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself,” but who may also be said to die from the energetic imbalance of his environment (Gold 196). Krook’s is a place where “everything seemed to be bought and nothing to be sold,” and Krook’s principle that “all’s fish that comes to my net,” leads to not only his belongings’ but his own “wasting away and going to rack and ruin” (qtd in Gold 196). As at Krook’s, no work may be done at Miss Havisham’s and nothing must leave: not even the remaining output of the brewery, which similarly threatens the occupants of the accumulative space, as “there’s enough [strong beer] in the cellars already, to drown the Manor House” (49). But Miss Havisham’s closure surpasses even Krook’s, for nothing comes in to her net either. Except for the barest trickle, neither information nor energy may enter the woman or the space. Forestalling even the mention of what day it is, Miss Havisham insists that she does not want to know. She never allows herself to be seen eating or drinking, nor has she seen the

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sun since before Pip was born. The brewery is merely a place where beer was made in bygone days, a place marked by the absence of usable energy in its “extinguished fires” (54). Similarly, the landscape surrounding the house is defined by the conspicuous absence of life and work: “there were no pigeons in the dove-cot, no horses in the stable, no pigs in the sty, no malt in the storehouse” (54). Even such signs of work as the scents of brewing and its smoke are long gone. Decay is rampant in the yellowing dress, the dust and cobwebs, and in Miss Havisham’s own shrunken frame. Indeed, Miss Havisham herself appears not merely as the corpse thus shrouded, and as a ghost in her own brewery, but as a body on the verge of complete physical decay; she reminds Pip of “bodies buried in ancient times, which fall to powder in the moment of being distinctly seen” and looking “as if the admission of the natural light of day would have struck her to dust” (54). This living death bespeaks the inevitable progress of entropy to which Miss Havisham has consigned herself through her attempts to close the system—an irrepressible indicator of the passage of time. If Estella represents a glimmer of hope, this star too must eventually fade from a lack of sustaining energy. She lives under Miss Havisham’s embargo on sunlight, shut up, as she describes herself, “wholly in the dark confinement of these rooms, [never knowing] that there was such a thing as the daylight” (231). This closure is at once literal and figurative. Encompassing Estella’s minimal contact with the out of doors, the denial of the human body’s proper sustenance, and the lack of love, this “dark confinement” is the closure that deprives the individual of sustaining contact with larger systems, social, economic and energetic. Fully aware of the energetic deprivation under which she thus lives, Estella further argues that this unfits her for the larger environment. If, she says, you teach a child “from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might, that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had blighted you and would else blight her,”—well, under such circumstances, one cannot very well expect “her to take naturally to the daylight and she could not do it” (231). Estella thus understands herself as the natural result of an unnatural upbringing—a paradox that points to the untold efforts that go into cultivating the “natural,” as well as the impossibility of avoiding natural law. The antithesis of Boltzmann’s proactive plants, spreading out to make the fullest use of the sun’s energy (see Chap. 3), Estella, not allowed outside, is threatened with blight.

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Miss Havisham, moreover, deploying her “utmost energy and might” on thus depriving Estella, further suggests the problems of a closure we ourselves struggle hard to make. And yet, like Eliza Reed, Miss Havisham seeks this condition and for a long time, finds some kind of comfort in it—as many less hyperbolically do in the idea of self-sufficiency and the sense of well-maintained borders. This comfort may even be a significant part of the pleasure of reading novels. Tina Choi has argued eloquently that the formal structure of the Novel creates a “reassuring promise of a world of eternal returns, in which causes and effects would always be contained,” in which “resolution, like the rainfall, must be drawn from that bounded system itself” (316, 302–3). Dickens is notorious for creating this kind of apparent closure, and Great Expectations is no exception. A complex network of coincidence ties this novel together: Herbert Pocket was the pale young gentleman at Miss Havisham’s, Jaggers is everyone’s lawyer, and Magwitch turns out to be Estella’s father. The resolution draws from the contained system itself, creating a strong impression that the system is closed, that everyone and everything comes from within. Not unlike Miss Havisham, the novel works to enact a fantasy of containment. The nineteenth-century novel, moreover, is developed in conversation with the development of the science of thermodynamics.1 With an authorship and audience increasingly aware of both energy conservation and entropic decay, it draws its reassurance from (what is or will become, depending on the novel) the first law of thermodynamics: “no aspect of energy’s conservation escapes that narratorial vision” (Choi 313). At the same time, it suppresses the implications of the second law, eliminating “thermodynamic waste…by force of rhetoric” alone (Choi 313). The novel proclaims its own self-sufficiency and professes to clean up its own mess, enacting a fantasy of closure that reflects and reveals a desire for moral and political self-sufficiency. In the bildungsroman, this fantasy of closure maps onto the notion of the independent individual, and Great Expectations shows how it ties further to the wish to secure distinctions of class, place and nation.

1  See my ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science and Allen MacDuffie’s Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination.

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Problems of Place But as Miss Havisham suggests, closure is neither possible nor desirable. Satis house suggests not only the dire results of isolation—of the individual from the place, of the place from other places—but also the hubris involved in gainsaying their interdependence. The very self-sufficiency implied by the name of Satis House, the enoughness thus rhetorically compelled, imprints elsewhere with a mark of insufficiency, as Pip’s visits to Satis House foster Pip’s increasing dissatisfaction with home. From the start, Pip’s expectations confer a mobility and an apparent independence that entail a similar denigration of place and its associated labor, compelling even Trabb to the observation “that London gentlemen cannot be expected to patronise local work” (119). Satis House is part of a much larger pattern. Repeatedly, the insistence that one place is self-sufficient denigrates and effaces the other, on which the first nonetheless depends— most obviously, in Pip’s rejection of his childhood home. But Dickens’s exploration of place-attachment is not merely about nostalgia for the home that was. There can be no doubt that Great Expectations is highly critical of Pip’s rejection of his childhood home, but his interest in the construction of space is more complicated than mere censure. If place is “space to which meaning has been ascribed” (qtd in Buell FEC 63), Dickens explores the experience of shifts in those meanings, even as he makes visible the considerable rhetorical work that creates such shifts. Pip is away from home for only a week when he notes an expansion of time and space: it feels like “many months” since the previous Sunday and “the space interposed” between himself and the people there “partook of that expansion” (145–6). Even the marshes seem “any distance off” and his erstwhile presence at his childhood home seem “a combination of impossibilities, geographical and social, solar and lunar” (146). The sense of distance, of separation and isolation, and indeed, of self-­ sufficiency, require considerable discursive effort. They depend on multiple mythologies of separation and closure that make the metropolis, only five-hours distant, seem terribly far from the marshes. The shift in Pip’s own perception attendant upon his expectations, and the older Pip’s regrets and self-recriminations, suggest that Dickens, in common with contemporary ecocriticism, worries “that modernization” along with its concomitant increase in physical and social mobility, “has rendered place-­ attachment nugatory and obsolete” (Buell FEC 64). Great Expectations suggests further, how such place attachment may operate at multiple scales

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and how—so far from being inconsequential—it can be part of a greater ecological imaginary that suppresses the second-law implications of energetic dependency, resource depletion, and waste production. With a profound if intuitive scientific honesty, Dickens explores the processes and problems with asserting self-containment and sufficiency, unpacking the work it takes to distinguish one place from another, to fence off the household, to separate town from country, to define the nation. This work of separation is critical to Pip’s immersion in the ecological imaginary, especially “the consensus myths of nationness in American and British history that appeal to defining iconic images of national territory” (Buell 81). The older, reflective Pip is gently reproving of such consensus myths: We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable to doubt our having and our being the best of everything: otherwise, while I was scared by the immensity of London, I think I might have had some faint doubts whether it was not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty. (129)

Such an opening to the second stage of Pip’s expectations is highly suggestive. On the one hand, it expands the notion of place attachment. Even as we feel Pip’s regret at his detachment from his childhood home, he attaches himself to the larger construct of Britain. “We Britons,” moreover, suggests not only the current physical expanses of the British empire (where, say, “we English” would not) but also the depths of time, evoking the Ancient Britons, the Celtic people who inhabited southern Britain before the Romans and long before the draining of the fens. Thus, even the older, reflective Pip participates in the localism that would naturalize nation and place. At the same time, neither Pip nor Dickens is blind to the downside of place attachment, to the fact that “localism and attachment to place may be problematic from a political point of view” (Gagnier and Delveaux 575). Although the young Pip feels that it would be “treasonable to doubt” London and Britain’s epitomizing…well…everything, Dickens makes it clear that immersion in this particular consensus myth depends on the suppression of his perceptions of anything ugly, crooked, narrow or dirty, that would disillusion. And even though Pip is able, retrospectively, to recuperate these perceptions, it still requires a thick layer of qualifiers for him to express them: “Otherwise… I think I might have had some faint doubts whether it was not…” These verbal contortions suggest the enduring power of the mythology that Pip internalizes, and

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suggest the workings of what I will call “toxic obfuscation”—the largely invisible counterpart to Buell’s “toxic discourse,” which conceals rather than reveals ecological and social problems attendant on industrialization and imperial expansion.

Toxic Obfuscations The construct “We Britons,” depends ipso facto on a clear set of non-­ Britons. And where there might be any ambiguity in the case, a casual rhetorical figure can serve to bring home the point. Thus, the time and space dilation Pip experiences between the marshes and the metropolis prepare Pip to understand Wemmick’s “pointing with his pen at the office floor to express that Australia was … symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe” (155). Wemmick’s gesture is intended to illustrate the consummate skill of Pip’s new guardian, Mr. Jaggers, who is “deep…as Australia” (155). But from the perspective of place creation, this is a misdirection that enhances the effect. In the kind of sleight of hand we have seen effected by animal metaphors in Jane Eyre (see Chap. 6), the tenor, Mr. Jaggers occupies all of our attention. Fixated on the impressive Mr. Jaggers, it is assumed we simply know how deep Australia really is. But the belief in the symmetrical opposition of Australia is key to the sense of British self-sufficiency, and so we are discouraged from looking into it too closely. It is of a piece with the proscription of Magwitch—the elephant who is not allowed in the room. At the level of narration, Magwitch is Dickens’s clearest effort to close the novelistic system. At once Pip’s unknown benefactor and Estella’s father, his late appearance in the story circles us first-law fashion back to its beginnings. It further obviates the implications of the second law, disentangling Pip from dependence on Miss Havisham and the house with no sunlight. At the same time that Magwitch enacts the novel’s profound anxiety that sustained closure is impossible, he also broadcasts the workings of toxic obfuscation on the global scale. In spite of the novelistic commitment to closing the system, he makes clear why it is “death to come back” (243). Like Bertha Rochester and the Bertrams’ Antiguan plantation, Magwitch serves as a critical resource for a system that would prefer not to depend on him. This proving impossible, it works to deny his existence. For, it is the convict who makes the gentleman, much as Bertha’s wealth is necessary to sustain Rochester in the manner which his father thinks necessary. But where Rochester’s revulsion is largely personal and

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sexualized, Pip’s personal revulsion is more overtly political, echoed in the national sense that “there’s been overmuch coming back of late years…” (243). Magwitch thus articulates an anxiety that the nation is not a self-­ sustaining, independent system; with him, the mythology regarding directional flow of resources will be busted. Australia, it seems, is not, “symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe,” but as close as the imagination can allow. It is thus not just to save his life, but to sustain the ecological imaginary that Magwitch’s arrival triggers repeated efforts to hide the fact. But all such efforts meet with similar difficulties. He can be neither hidden in the chambers nor adequately disguised to leave them. The harder Pip tries, the more conspicuous the processes of hiding become: “The more I dressed him and the better I dressed him, the more he looked like the slouching fugitive on the marshes” (252). Pip specifies further that “everything in him that it was most desirable to repress, started through that thin layer of pretense, and seemed to come blazing out at the crown of his head” (253). Interestingly, the thin layer of pretense includes, among other things, a thin layer of powder—Magwitch’s own idea—which further links the convict to the “mighty Justices” he will eventually face but to Miss Havisham’s anticipated “fall[ing] to powder” as well as (85, 52). At the same time, Pip works to dissociate the convict from these and other respectable folk, and to naturalize that dissociation, locating the problem in Magwitch himself: There was “something in him that made it hopeless to attempt to disguise him” (252). There was “convict in the very grain of the man” (252). But such efforts to establish Magwitch as essentially or “naterally wicious” are futile and short-lived (26). Dickens makes it clear that it is the circumstances of his life that engrains the convict in the man, the influences of his solitary life in Australia, of living branded among men, the consciousness of being still on the run, the lifelong threat of hunger that has established the habit of sopping up every last bit of gravy—that have conspired to tag him as “Prisoner, Felon, Bondsman, plain as plain could be” (253). Such portrayals of social construction alert us to the larger dependence of culture on such semiotic making, as well as on the toxic obfuscations that must take place to render the making itself invisible. It is because of the latter, because of the need to enact self-sufficiency, to suppress its thermodynamic impossibility, that Magwitch is so thoroughly condemned. His return reveals the limits of discursive (re)construction.

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Such things as could be said for him were said,—how he had taken to industrious habits, and had thriven lawfully and reputably. But nothing could unsay the fact that he had returned, and was there in presence of the Judge and Jury. It was impossible to try him for that, and do otherwise than find him guilty. (339, italics mine)

Magwitch’s return lets the cat out of the attic: it collapses beyond repair the carefully constructed narrative of self-sufficiency, distance, and closure. With his story made public, we can’t help but “doubt our having and our being the best of everything” (129). His role as Pip’s benefactor reveals the fact that if we do have it all, it is because we get it from somewhere else. And it can’t be unsaid. Dickens’s demonstration of how narrative may work to obscure the implications of energy science—the impossibility of closure, of truly sustainable self-sufficiency—comes just as the laws of thermodynamics are being popularized. Great Expectations reveals the discursive conditions that pave the way for later attempts to obscure the flow of resources and effectively unsay the science. For example, Allen MacDuffie has written wonderfully about the ways that evolving economic discourse, as revealed through the work of Joseph Conrad, undermines scientific principles even as it deploys thermodynamic terms: Just as energy conservation and dissipation were becoming more firmly entrenched as principles with which to model the transformations of the physical world, economic discourse was abstracting out the pressures, restrictions, and limitations such principles described, while still freely borrowing the terminology. (MacDuffie ELH 80)

This “abstracting out” obfuscates the real workings of real energy in the real world. It obscures the flow of resources and, eventually, the limitations of economic growth dependent on the use of fossil fuels. MacDuffie goes on to discuss the ways “entropy…menaces the capitalist order,” at once undermining all human attempts at “progressively or finally subduing the world” and (especially for Conrad) staging the “almost unthinkable amount of work” that goes into the imperial and capitalist exploitation of somebody else’s resources (ELH 90). Four decades before the publication of Heart of Darkness, Dickens reveals the processes of toxic obfuscation through which such thermodynamic necessities are obscured.

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Jaggers, The Great Obfuscator Deftly avoiding what might be called a bit of “light treason” (Arrested Development S1 E22), Dickens does not begin by revealing obfuscating consensus myths at the national scale; he does not simply confirm any doubts we might have about “our having and our being the best of everything.” Instead, he provides us with a microcosm of toxic obfuscation, emanating from the aptly named Little Britain and shaped by its pre-­ eminent obfuscator: the lawyer Jaggers, the guardian of allowable speech. Through him, Dickens makes visible the processes by which culpability is suppressed and complicity, even toxicity, is camouflaged. This suppression reveals itself in Jaggers’s frequent insistence on not knowing things. His desire for selective ignorance, revealed on Pip’s first seeing him in London, echoes Miss Havisham’s earlier “I don’t want to know” (69) and is reiterated by Jaggers himself and echoed by Wemmick in their systematic denials of the return of the convict. The circularity thus effected in the novel’s obsession with what one wants (not) to know, has its counterpart in the circularity of Jaggers’s initial phrasing: “I want to know,” he asserts, “no more than I know” (132). This micro-sized example of narrative closure, circles back upon itself—creating an illusion of the completeness of information, of the whole truth and nothing but the truth. As Jaggers’s statement is intended to prevent his assistant Mike from telling him interdicted things, we are able to see roughly what must be left out to create the illusion that will constitute “truth” at trial. It must seem that the witness has not been brought in from outside and that no external work has gone in to presenting him as such. Jaggers works to suppress not so much the system’s dependence on things outside itself, as the visibility of such borrowing and the work involved in its erasure. So Mike, if he knows what’s good for him, had best not say aloud that a witness will swear to “anythink” lest it come to mean nothing. Once the unfortunate Mike succeeds in rendering an allowable/meaningful answer, in declaring that his witness will swear “ayther to character, or to having been in his company and never left him all the night in question,” we begin the process again (134). And Jaggers’s questions regarding the preparation of his witness continue to be characteristically insistent on non-information. This time, however, we see that truth construction is not limited to words: material things are also made part of the closed semiotic-system. Not only words but clothing must also be brought in line with the cultural mythology in question. Thus, as Jaggers questions the social station of the

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proposed witness, Mike slips again, beginning with “We’ve dressed him up like—.” This is clearly an unacceptable response, judging from Jaggers’s blustering “What? You WILL, will you?” (134). But Mike’s ongoing trials suggest the surreptitious work of the passive voice. After a bit more “helpless casting about,” Mike comes up with an acceptable statement: “He is dressed like a ‘spectable pieman. A sort of a pastry-cook” (134). Mike, then, is receiving an education in making allowable statements that are consistent with the contained master narrative to which he must keep. The truth, like the witness, must appear, like the individual, to stand alone. Dickens’s disclosure here of the work that goes into this simple passive statement highlights the problematics of passivity on a much larger scale. The (self-)similarity between Mike’s “is dressed” and Pip’s reflective “our having and being” suggests the complex rhetorical efforts that may shape our understanding of the world. As the witness simply is dressed like a pieman, with no reference to how he got that way, “we Britons” focus only on “our having and our being the best of everything” without looking too deeply into how we may have arrived at this enviable state. To some extent, this will be a familiar conclusion: Dickens knew something about the production of ideology and the construction of truth. As hosts of English teachers have long exhorted their students to avoid the passive voice, we may need to undo the pervasive passivity of our cultural mythologies. It is a key contribution that the humanities can make to our current ecological crisis, whether these occur in the spin rooms of public politics or as the unintended consequences of the casual utterance, whether in the visible nationalism of “We Britons” (or, closer to my home, “We Americans”), whether in the erasure of history that naturalizes malaria on the “meshes” or as the unintended consequences of a casual metaphor that insists that Australia is “deep” when for a host of practical purposes, it is right next door.

An Aside on Recycling: The Avenger That we understand such revelatory work as disclosure suggests the implicit but pervasive connection between standards of evidence, cultural mythology, and the workings of energy and ecosystems. Our predilection for closed narratives—the whole truth and nothing but the truth, whatever truth we may prefer—is a necessary condition of the mythologies that impair our understanding of the ecosystems in which we reside. This predilection, by the way, does not restrict itself to narratives of national

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greatness or personal independence. For one thing, as we saw in the opening chapters of this book, it is perfectly possible to forget that the vast majority of energetic systems are not closed—that we frequently take for granted how much we depend on energy from outside sources, from the sun to “foreign” fossil fuels to someone else’s labor. To illustrate the pervasiveness of the fantasy of closure, even among those committed to ecology, one need only think of those charming ecospheres (small terrariums available online or at your local science store at a cost of anywhere from ten to two hundred dollars) or their elementary school counterparts made of empty soda bottles. Undoubtedly the educational microcosms of biological systems, they nonetheless enact a fantasy of self-sufficiency, of systems that perpetually take care of themselves. Their illusion of perpetual motion, however, is belied by their critical dependence on sunlight and, in the ten-dollar model, the need for regular supplies of fresh water. Anyone who has attempted the fourth grade version, moreover, knows how difficult it is to sustain such systems, which tend to grow toxic over time and kill your crickets. We have already seen something of Victorian thinking on what we would call “recycling” (see Chap. 3). Thinkers as diverse as Henry Mayhew and James Prescott Joule get mired in discussions of sewage, worrying about the nutrients that are removed from the London soil and wasted in smelly deposits downstream, as well as the costly importation of Peruvian guano that serves to recompense the soil for these losses. These efforts to “mak[e] the system work conservatively” (Choi 310) are Victorian calls for more sustainable systems based on reuse and recycling. Mayhew’s efforts further attach to a larger kind of social inclusiveness, in which “no persons are lost within the city’s vast economy” (Choi 310). They partake, nonetheless, of fantasies of thermodynamic closure and local or national independence that, as we have seen, are thermodynamically unsustainable. This aspect of recycling narratives was not lost on the Victorians. Barbara Leckie has recently argued that “the very appeal [Mayhew] makes to a reassuring closed circuit of natural cycles” in his London Labour and the London Poor, “is undercut by his own practice of open-circuit recycling” as well as his sensitivity “to the creative fertility of ‘rags and refuse’” (Choi 221). This is not to say that we shouldn’t recycle, but we may wish to think carefully about the work and the waste and even the mythologies associated with our own attempts at recycling, sustaining, or conserving. Indeed, any attempt at recycling must consider both the benefits and the costs, the

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energy forms that are thus rendered re-usable and those which are expended in doing so. The recent craze for paper straws comes to mind: while we may rejoice in straws that are, unlike the usual plastic kind, actually biodegrade, we need also consider the sheer amount of effort and waste that goes into recycling paper, not least the deinking sludge that in its turn proves an environmental threat of its own (see Kulakrni et al). We might also recall the corporate greenwashing that created the “litterbug” in the 1970s, a piece of misdirection driven by the desire to create a consumer willing to buy disposable products (mostly bottles) and focused on cleaning up after themselves rather than on the large-scale irresponsibility of abandoning reusables in the first place (see Strand). This is a particularly insidious form of toxic obfuscation, as it appeals to the very environmental concerns that it undermines; that it does so by focusing attention on the individual (now conceived as a potential litterbug) in order to obscure the larger system, suggests the problematics of narrative closure in the ways we think about moral responsibility. Pip’s efforts at recycling are neither Mayhew’s delight in “rags and refuse” nor the result of any Keep America Beautiful greenwashing campaign. They are, rather, the result of his efforts to recreate the individual within a larger system whose workings and history he cannot see. They further suggest Dickens’s sensitivity to the energetic cost of creating and sustaining one’s social position. While living at Barnard’s Inn, Pip takes a stab at home improvement and even sets out to create a proper servant in livery, to “[start] a boy in boots—top boots—out of the refuse of my washerwoman’s family” (169). By doing so, he not only cooperates unknowingly with Magwitch’s efforts to make a gentleman “on” him, he also struggles to “make the system work conservatively” in at least two ways—recycling the “refuse” of the system even as he struggles to reproduce a traditional picture of the gentleman of means. Making the system work conservatively, however, entailed some “very expensive…wrestles with Barnard” (169) and the boy in boots, whom Pip dubs “the Avenger,” turns out almost as thermodynamically and ecologically suggestive as Miss Havisham herself. That Pip claims to have made the Avenger out of refuse suggests an attempt to close the system by recycling, by transforming a waste product into a usable resource. Enacting a characteristically Victorian anxiety that children as a class are a gratuitous, nonproductive population, Pip attempts to fashion this boy into a productive member of his household, the boot boy or “boots.” But Pip’s efforts prove wasteful and

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(potentially) obfuscating, and the Avenger comes to illustrate how making the system work conservatively requires a great deal of work Testing the bounds of Victorian thermodynamic sensibility, Pip finds that he must put far more work into his recycling efforts than he actually gets out of them. He must find the boy “a little to do and a great deal to eat”(169). The results, however, reverse expected relationships of work, as Pip comes to pass his days “in bondage and slavery to” this servant “who never attended on me if he could possibly help it” (174). Furthermore, if the Avenger were ever to do some, his work would be of dubious value. For while the boots is a low-ranking hard-working young member of the servant class, the clothing Pip provides the Avenger, the “blue coat, canary waistcoat, white cravat, creamy breeches, and the boots already mentioned” (169), are a livery that mark him as one of the more expensive kinds of servants, whose labor all but the most wealthy families could forgo. The profusion of light colors in this livery, moreover, suggests that the Avenger must steer clear of dirty work and/or that a lot of additional effort (probably Mum’s) will be required to keep up appearances. The vengeance wrought by the Avenger is the disclosure of the thermodynamic cost of creating the signs of social order.

Living in the Semiosphere If the Avenger suggests just how much effort goes into creating the consensus myth of the gentleman, he also points to a process of reading and interpreting signs that is by no means limited to the social. Indeed, Great Expectations suggests that such work is ongoing at every level at which we understand ourselves. Pip’s engagement in cultural meaning making begins very early. If the novel itself seems complicit (as suggested above) in the naturalization of the “universal struggle” to which Pip’s brothers succumb as well as in the sleight of narrative that directs our attention to the one seed at the expense of the others, Pip’s identity construction is presented as patently procedural. Giving his father’s name “on the authority of his tombstone” (and Mrs. Joe’s say-so), the young Pip goes on to create a family portrait: The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, “Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. (9)

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In this passage, literal letters (what else?) substitute for any memory of his parents or even so mediated a reality as a picture of either, “for their days were long before the days of photographs” (9). Moreover, where this first tombstone tells Pip who he is, a second one stabilizes his world: for Pip, having been turned upside down to have his pockets emptied, finds the world righted—“when the church came to itself”—and himself seated on a high tombstone to which he clings in his fear of Magwitch, seeking the cold-solid reality of words written in stone (10). Dickens thus very briefly gestures toward an experience that seems all culture, no nature. But as we have seen so many times before, this is a problematic binary. Dickens is quick to situate Pip in “the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea” (9). The five little stone lozenges marking his brothers’ graves do gesture toward a different kind of genealogy, as well as to a natural reality distinguishable from, but entangled with the written (or chiseled) word. The proliferation of tombstones evokes the micro-climate of the marshes, the spread of disease, the biological and economic challenges of “trying to get a living… in that universal struggle,” and the complicity of humans in the toxicity of that environment. At the same time, Dickens establishes an inextricable connection between words and things. In this way, he suggests a different kind of reading practice—one that goes beyond the mirror-like reinforcement of the self (which we see in Joe’s scouring books and newspapers for Js and Os [40]), to disclose the larger ecological narrative to which the text gestures if we let it. Pip’s coming into consciousness in a cemetery of a village on the marshes, as much on the margins of “nature” and “culture” as any garden, seems to suggest a human attempt to render legible the harshness of both nature and culture manifest in the death of almost all of Pip’s family. As we have seen in Chap. 6, Jane Eyre’s sense of herself as an individual develops together with her sense of an environment—one in which she figures as a toxic element taking shelter on the margins of a system only slightly less hostile than her perceived alternatives. She thus develops the kind of “traitorous identity” (Plumwood 205) that helps her to see herself, or helps us to see her, as an ecological being. Without even a window seat like Jane’s to solidify the metaphor, Pip too is clearly constituted on this margin, and indeed, his own sense of identity is last in his early awareness of the “identity of things”:

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My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip. (9–10)

As Pip comes to an awareness of self, he does so as a rather under-­ differentiated element in a bleak and marshy countryside: the “small bundle of shivers” emerges last in an accounting of a landscape that requires the delineations of the marshes, the churchyard, scattered cattle, dead siblings, and the sea. His discovery of his dead family is nested within a series of interpretive gestures in which he reads signs that are not exclusively linguistic—though his account of them is. The dark flat wilderness is delineated as the marshes; the low leaden line, the river; and so on. Indeed, in a masterpiece of parallel structure, Dickens repeatedly stages the move from impression to the (relative) certainty of names—repeated moves of interpretation and naming that organize a complex sensory experience, dividing its parts into nameable things—Pip himself among them. Pip only comes both to know himself and to name himself as a delineated part of an environment, which is constituted as his environment at roughly the same time and in the same way, as he is himself. He moves from a nexus of sensory experience and emotion, a “small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all” to an identifiable, localizable, individual Pip. In this way, naming brings an already semiotic feedback loop into the realm of language. Linguistic construction slips neatly into a broader kind of semiotic construction; Pip becomes in concert with a much larger becoming. Dickens suggests that Pip’s co-becomes, along with his deceased brothers (now named), and the churchyard and the river and the wind, “that organisms and environments co-evolve in signs and interpretation” (Wheeler 145). From the first, Great Expectations suggests a negotiation in which language and culture interact with the semiotics of material circumstances to produce an individual, at once socially and

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naturally framed, in conversation with a readable environment—a semiosphere from which he cannot be separated, and which he must be able to read, if he is to survive. The convict brings home forcefully the lesson that Pip’s survival depends on his capacity to organize sensory information, to read and interpret signs of all sorts. Thus as he approaches what Pip terms “my tombstone,” he puts forth the “question” as to “whether [Pip is] to be let to live” (11, 10). The answer depends precisely on Pip’s capacity to identify things: “You know what a file is?” asks Magwitch (11), apparently locating Pip’s survival in technological knowledge (for if we are inclined to such distinctions, we may take the file to represent a human production). But Magwitch’s second question, “And you know what wittles is” (11) obscures clear boundaries between technological and natural fluency; Pip must be able to read both, if he is to keep his heart and liver (not to mention his fat cheeks) safe from being “tore out, roasted, and ate” (11), from becoming “wittles” himself, from becoming an energy source rather than a user or sink (an anxiety magnified, as we shall see, with the culinary preferences of Wells’s Martians). Perched on his tombstone, undergoing this catechism, Pip participates in a demonstration of the semiotic work all living beings must do to survive—distinguishing food from not food, recognizing danger, interpreting signs as needed in order not to become food. If we thus understand life as engaging in semiotic interpretation continuous with those we practice in language, we open up our notion of semiotics in order to work, like “wittles,” against a worldview that closes off nature from culture. It does not take long for this life-sustaining work of interpretation to become thoroughly entangled with the consensus myth of property. Myriad tales contribute to what seems an apparently closed master narrative, which, among other things, establishes what may belong to whom. These manifest on the small scale in Pip’s casual assumption that all the “housekeeping property” belongs to Mrs. Joe and not her husband (16), the guilt he feels at his “secret burden” of bolted bread and butter down the leg of his trousers and at robbing Mrs. Joe of numerous Christmas treats, including a “beautiful round compact pork pie” (19). Pip’s early immersion in the myths of property is further inscribed on the landscape: The gates and dikes and banks and the cattle with steaming nostrils accuse him—“bursting at [him] through the mist, as if they cried as plainly as could be, ‘A boy with Somebody’s else’s pork pie!’” (19). The apparent collaboration of the landscape in cultural mythology continues as Pip takes

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his leave of his childhood home, resolving to “finish off the marshes at once, and get them done with” (115)—a gesture at systemic closure that, as we have seen, cannot ultimately succeed. Now, however, he has the expectations of a gentleman, and even the cattle seem “in their dull manner, to wear a more respectful air” (115). While they gaze upon the “possessor of such great expectations” (115), the cattle seem disinclined to ponder the problematic possession of someone else’s proverbial pork pie. It is only the re-narration—the reflection of the older Pip—that exposes Pip’s troubling inculcation as well as his complicity in meaning making. Patently reflective of Pip’s feelings, the landscape is far from pristine, revealing the young Pip’s internalization and re-externalization of culture’s laws. But its projected accusations suggest not only his guilt for trespassing and stealing, but also, perhaps, the fragility of these myths that require even a young child to participate in cultural distinctions of right and property, even as he crosses the bounds laid out by these myths and escapes with his plunder. To a reader so-inclined, Pip’s transgression further evokes complicity in the larger culture of imperialism that depends for its continuance on the appropriation of “somebody else’s pork pie” writ large. Pip’s potential for “traitorous identity” may inhere in his having early and often (been) identified with the pig, even as it is served up as “wittles” for his consumption. And his act of compassionate theft suggests more broadly the ways we draw boundaries around systems that we imagine as closed but that, like Mrs. Joe’s cupboard, cannot or should not be kept so.

Walworth Salad As strongly as Dickens suggests that what we consider individual identity is made in concert with an already semiotic environment, he also suggests that this environment is itself neither natural nor cultural but already and inevitably an amalgam. And we like it that way: for better or worse, “humans become the prisoner of their own transformation of nature and society,” dependent upon “the social and material organization they have created.”2 It is, moreover, as Pip learns early, “a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home” (86). It seems unlikely and probably unnecessary that we will abandon all sense of place or boundaries or identity any time soon. Nonetheless, a (self-) knowledge of complicity, resistance, 2

 Stephen Bunker, Underdeveloping the Amazon, qtd. in MacDuffie ELH, p. 93.

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dependence and responsibility, can perhaps go a long way to alleviate the toxic effects, literal and figurative, of our impulse to closure. The ecological history of any place is an impossibly complex network of actors and their interrelations, an impossibly long series of energetic exchanges; precise narrative causality, with culpability exactly and proportionately ascribed, is neither possible nor, perhaps, necessary. An awareness that such causality exists may go a long way. We cannot trace energy transformations all the way back. We can’t even un-drain the fens or roll back London to some “natural” state. Nor can we pinpoint who is or what is to blame. But knowledge that we are at least in part responsible, for good and for ill, may go a long way to making us less passive, more careful. As Martin Ryle suggests: “In the development of an ecological ethics and politics, a self-knowledge ironically aware of complicity as well as of resistance will prove at least as useful as the invocation of residually unpolluted ‘organic’ ways of being” (19). Pip is and perhaps never has been innocent. But his progress may be read as his developing such ironic self-knowledge, which enables his recognition of his dependence on and responsibility toward both Jo and Magwitch. Each of these represents an acknowledgment of the energetic entanglements—inevitable but obscured—between people and places that may seem far away: the country and the city, (Little) Britain and Australia. Further, each suggests that the interactions between these need not necessarily be toxic: where Orlick’s crossings may seem such a toxic seepage, Joe’s are healing. Pip has this relative openness of mind forced upon him; Wemmick may be said to seek his through his cultivation of the Castle at Walworth. This tiny home sits in the midst of a “collection of back lanes, ditches, and little gardens” (160). Its top is “cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns” (160), and it is surrounded by a moat, across which Wemmick ceremonially raises and lowers a drawbridge. Wemmick’s castle quite clearly, if quietly, both expresses and satirizes the sentiment that “a Englishman’s ouse is his Castle” (346). It also expresses a qualified hope for a self-sustaining system that we and Wemmick know to be impossible: “—At the back, there’s a pig, and there are fowls and rabbits; then, I knock together my own little frame, you see, and grow cucumbers; and you’ll judge at supper what sort of a salad I can raise” (161). Wemmick’s capacity to raise a salad points to efforts at sustainability. In stark contrast with the “rank garden” at Satis House, where the dovecot has no pigeons and the stable, no horses, where the brewery-yard is now but a “wilderness of empty casks” (54), Wemmick’s garden is alive and productive.

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Moreover, the labor that sustains this landscape is his own: “I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber, and my own gardener, and my own Jack of all Trades” (161). Wemmick’s emphasis on local work and locally grown vegetables may well have seemed more sustainable, or at least less costly, to Victorians like James Prescott Joule, who worried about the wastefulness of bringing cattle from the country to London for slaughter (see Chap. 3). Pip, aspiring gentleman that he is, expresses a preference that “the pig might have been farther off” (163)—a wish we can understand not only spatially but also as fraught with anxiety regarding the myth of the gentleman himself. But the first-rate sausage that he eventually toasts for the Aged, and very likely the pork loin and the side of greens they share for dinner, are all locally grown (278). In this way, the Castle establishes Wemmick’s relative independence from Little Britain and all it implies, “brushing the Newgate cobwebs away” (161). While the Castle mimics aspects of the closed, independent system, it is emphatically not one. Wemmick manages enough separation that the smaller is neither subsumed, nor cut off from the connectedness that sustains it. It is clear that he has made significant efforts to signify the permeability of its boundaries: the moat and the drawbridge and the ingenious contrivances that announce the arrival of John and Miss Skiffins, suggest at once the impossibility and even the absurdity of closure even as they parody its forms. Undoubtedly, “Walworth is one place, and [the] office is another” (221). Jaggers never comes there: “Never seen it… Never heard of it. Never seen the Aged. Never heard of him. No; the office is one thing, and private life is another” (162). So too are the country and the city, London and Australia. “They must not be confounded together” (221). Nor, however, can they be fully separated. Wemmick’s independence is not Miss Havisham’s or Eliza Reed’s or even Fanny Price’s. It is neither isolated nor stunted, but populated and in growth. And it depends on acknowledging his ongoing connections to the professional, the rural, and the colonial. Resources must traverse the boundaries of interdependent systems, or like Satis House, they will only speed their decay. Thus, Wemmick asserts, both smiling and serious, that the place “would hold out a devil of a time in point of provisions,” if one could only imagine “the little place besieged” (161). “A devil of a time” is not forever, and the underlying premise here is that such a state of closure can only “hold out” against an inevitable and necessary re-opening. Of course, the Castle is not a perfect (or even probable) solution. Like the novel and the landscape, it cannot be innocent, cannot be pristine.

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Sometimes complicit and sometimes resistant, the Castle converses with Little Britain. It forms a clear part of the myth of Britishness (“a Englishman’s ouse”), as do Wemmick’s casual declaration of the depth of Australia and his fixation on “portable property” (e.g. 157, 207, 221). But also like these, Wemmick’s house at once contributes to that mythmaking and suggests connections that are not subsumed by the dominant narrative. It is, perhaps, of a piece with Wemmick’s fascination with forgery and false confessions (162)—revealing and enhancing the same myth that it belies. Similarly, Mr. Wemmick’s enthusiastic accumulation of “portable property” not only suggests his entanglement in commodity culture built upon troubling trade relations, but also insists that we acknowledge the mobility of resources. Rather than suppressing the source of this wealth, Wemmick graciously and gratefully accepts these gifts from condemned men, whom he seems to remember quite fondly. And while it is too late to help these men, such gratitude bolsters his willingness to help Magwitch. Within walking distance of Little Britain and yet completely beyond Jaggers’s knowledge, the Castle provides a place to connect to the people and spaces that form the abject of both the novel and the nation. Thus, Pip can go to the Castle to receive Wemmick’s “Walworth sentiments” (221). These depend upon his knowledge of Little Britain, and to share them, Wemmick deploys an expertise in myth-construction that he must certainly have learned in the Jaggers school. But the uses to which he puts these are revealing rather than obfuscating. In a statement as ingeniously twisted as the winding path to the Castle’s bower, Wemmick tells Pip he knows that Magwitch has returned: “I heard there by chance, yesterday morning,” said Wemmick, “that a certain person not altogether of uncolonial pursuits, and not unpossessed of portable property,—I don’t know who it may really be,—we won’t name this person—…Had made some little stir in a certain part of the world where a good many people go, not always in gratification of their own inclinations, and not quite irrespective of the government expense… By disappearing from such a place, and being no more heard of thereabouts. From which…conjectures had been raised and theories formed. I also heard that you at your chambers in Garden Court, Temple, had been watched, and might be watched again.” (275–6)

For all his use of the passive voice, this statement is not passive at all It is the result of considerable effort and is designed to convey rather than

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suppress information. Wemmick’s speech echoes the maintenance of boundaries manifested elsewhere visually, agriculturally and economically. As he enhances the distance from the drawbridge to the bower by ingenious twists of path, he traverses a winding verbal path between Magwitch and Little Britain—convoluted, perhaps, but not closed. We can hope that such efforts are not without meaning. After all, this tiny leakage of colonial concerns suffice for Pip to make “quite a firework of the Aged’s sausage” (276), a slip of Freudian proportions, whose sexual implications I will bypass to observe only that its energetic ones are quite clearly explosive. Bringing together the abject of Little Britain—the colonial and the domestic—Wemmick bears information across carefully regulated boundaries, even as he bears his portable property. He moves easily through distinct but interdependent ecologies, adjusting the roles he plays and varying his “sentiments” accordingly. At the same time, he performs their inevitable interdependence, enabled by a self-knowledge aware of complicity and dependence, capable of resistance and responsibility, and informed by a heavy dose of self-satire. His is thus the most quiet and most effective of the novel’s experiments in negotiating systemic boundaries: Miss Havisham’s ad absurdum demonstration of entropic closure; Magwitch’s assurance that “it’s death to come back” (243); even the introduction of malaria into the marshes—all of these point to the delineation and dissolution of ecologies. And while I am not willing to go so far as to suggest that the Castle at Walworth provides a practical solution, Wemmick’s model of semi-sustainability suggests that we forgo conceptual closure in favor of a more peripatetic vision, or at the least, that we direct our attention to the many things—drawbridges and salad, resources, toxins, and living beings—on whose movement our lives depend and for which (even some toxins, as we shall see in Chap. 8) we can be grateful.

CHAPTER 8

Narrative Energies & The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds is unlike anything we have read so far. It is, for starters, explicitly concerned with thermodynamics. Indeed, it is the kind of text one might use to propagate the mistaken belief that science may influence culture, but not the other way around. Novel Ecologies has so far focused on the energetic structures already present in the novel prior to the consolidation and dissemination of energy concepts, especially the laws of thermodynamics. From our previous chapters, it should be clear that the structures of these laws, especially their often unspoken emphases on closure and pervasive anxieties regarding degradation, exist in culture well before they manifest as scientific principles. Where Dickens may have done so, had he wished it and acted quickly enough, only Wells clearly signals that at base, all problems of resources, work and waste, consumption and self-conception, are ultimately problems of energy. Wells makes the energetic substrate obvious. And this allows him to survey available ecological discourse with an eye to its effectiveness. Thus, The War of the Worlds will do several things for us. First, it stages an ecological catastrophe driven by clear, thermodynamic inevitability, depicting a climatic change that Victorian readers would recognize as resulting from their own rapidly growing industrial culture; in the Martians we can’t help but recognize our own imperial ambitions, fears, and practices, as well as an increasing reliance on technological solutions. Second, it suggests how badly we respond, how ineffective are the narratives with which we shape © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. J. Gold, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68604-8_8

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our responses to disaster. In this way, The War of the Worlds offers a meditation on the failures of narrative form, how it shapes our actions and misplaces or wastes our energies. Finally, we shall explore how the form of this novel suggest a potential corrective to a world view that clings catastrophically to illusions of energetic closure and self-sufficiency. Surprisingly small and apparently uninterested in character development, The War of the Worlds develops a different kind of disaster narrative, whose loosely delineated, highly mobile perspective might offer a corrective to certain habitual, anti-ecological modes of thought that have help create and that continue to grow the crisis.

Part 1: Ecological Catastrophe Great Disillusionment The War of the Worlds promises one kind of story and provides an entirely different one. Announcing at the outset that we were once naive; our narrator implies that we are wiser now: “No one would have believed…” “No one gave a thought…” he tells us, underscoring our former failure of knowledge and imagination that presumably was corrected when, “early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment” (1). His opening reflections on the “infinite complacency” of humanity before this rude awakening, suggest that humanity, though beleaguered, will be wiser in the wake of the Martian invasion (1). It is a familiar, linear plot that moves from ignorance to knowledge. We begin as “a complacent and exploitative society sleepwalking to the brink of holocaust” (Markley), but end “amazed and afraid” (142). In future, we may hope to be less arrogant and self-centered, more sympathetic, less exploitative, for “we have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as … a secure abiding place for Man” (144). It is a promise emphatically unfulfilled. Neither the novel itself nor the history of the twentieth century following its publication is able to sustain such a beneficial disillusionment. We end very little wiser. We know little more about the Martians than we did at the outset, not even knowing whether “the destruction of the Martians is only a reprieve” or if “to them, and not to us…is the future ordained” (145). This ultimate unknowing seems familiar in Wells, recalling the end of The Time Machine, which, in spite of the narrator’s having spoken at length with a man who has been there, leaves him feeling that “the future is still black and blank—is a vast

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ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story” (176). Wells’s early novels refuse to resolve fully. His key figures, if they survive, end in a state of uncertainty and ignorance. The final words insist the story is not over. The Island of Doctor Moreau ends with the collapse of taxonomic categories: “I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also another Beast People, animals half wrought into the outward image of human souls” (192). The Invisible Man bequeaths the manuscripts that would explain everything to a man who cannot understand them, though he studies them religiously every Sunday afternoon with a glass of gin. He reads manuscripts, where the others read the world, but all find their knowledge inadequate to the task. Avatars of the reader, these figures share with us the “abiding sense of doubt and insecurity,” reshaping any conviction we may be forming that “now we see further” (145), since we see better only what we do not know and cannot control. In The Time Machine, as in The War of the Worlds, the most lingering and salutary effect of experience is the reframing of knowledge as ultimate ignorance. Like Enrico Fermi, we find ourselves still confused, but at a higher level. To embrace our ongoing, albeit better-informed, ignorance, however, may well be far more ecologically useful than remaining the annoying know-it-alls that we have been. In this way, the novel is not only ecological and open, but also “intrinsically dark, mysterious, and open, like an empty city square at dusk, a half-open door, or an unresolved chord” (ET 224), ultimately uncertain even in its resolutions. And this uncertainty is key to the mobility of perspective that as willfully energetic readers, we may view as the novel’s greatest effect. Black Smoke Transforming the landscape with the red weed, here trampling and there setting fire to the countryside, polluting the waters, and leaving innumerable deaths in their wake, the advent of the Martians, as David Evans observes, looks “less like a military campaign than an environmental disaster” (12). Of course, a military campaign generally is an environmental catastrophe, one that requires huge amounts of energy to effectively speed the increase of entropy as it transforms familiar landscapes into “heap[s] of fiery ruins” (40). And the Martians come bearing smoke—lots of smoke. Black and red smoke rises from the sites at which the Martians are first engaged, mingling with the “driving clouds of the gathering thunderstorm,” and “thick clouds of steam [that pour] off the wreckage” of a

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fallen Martian, partly submerged in the river. But most memorably, they discharge by means of rockets, a “black and poisonous vapour” from which “there is no safety…but in instant flight” (Wells 64). This vapor “pour[s] over the ground in a manner rather liquid than gaseous” forming rolling hills, “cloudy black kopjes” that are “heavier than the densest smoke” and “death to all that breathes” (68–9). It is a reification of the “breath of civilisation” that in Darwin proves so “poisonous ‘to savages’” (Descent 239); the arrival of these invaders portends the end of who knows how many indigenous species. But as we know all too well, environmental catastrophe begins at home. Back on Mars, “dense clouds of smoke or dust [are] visible through a powerful telescope on Earth as little grey, fluctuating patches” (5). Earth’s is not the first atmosphere so polluted by Martian technology. And the catastrophe the Martians create on Earth is not only frightening, but frighteningly familiar. In days, they accomplish a visible change in air quality that takes Victorian industry the better part of a century to effect. In The Sky of Our Manufacture, Jesse Oak Taylor has written at length on what would come to be called “smog,” a key element in Victorian reflections on anthropogenic climate change and a clear effect of increased and localized coal usage. John Ruskin, best known as an art critic and social thinker, is also one of the most vocal Victorians to indict humanity for atmospheric changes. In 1884, after 40 years of personal observation, he describes what he terms the “modern plague-cloud”: “Month by month darkness gains upon the day” (64)—a “gray cloud;—not rain-cloud, but a dry black veil, which no ray of sunshine can pierce,; partly diffused in mist, feeble mist, enough to make distant objects unintelligible…” (26). It is “a wind of darkness…whenever, and wherever the plague-­ wind blows, be it but for ten minutes, the sky is darkened instantly.” It is “a malignant quality of wind,” thoroughly distinct from “natural weather,” a bitter, nasty “poisonous blight,” bringing a peculiar darkness that “blanch[es] the sun instead of reddening it.” (Ruskin 27–8, 31)

Had the weather been in his youth what it had since become, Ruskin complains, he neither would nor could have written Modern Painters; such personal experience of beauty has since become impossible (64). And while he disclaims knowledge of their source, he is not without his speculations. A plague-cloud looks “partly as if it were made of poisonous

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smoke” and more “as if it were made of dead men’s souls.” The souls, no doubt, suggest that we are morally responsible, but the poisonous smoke implicates humanity no less. For while recent volcanic activity may account for some, Ruskin associates this smoke with the ubiquitous furnace chimneys he sees to every side, positively ruining thunderstorms with the “deep, high, filthiness of lurid, yet not sublimely lurid, smoke-cloud, dense manufacturing mist” (30) such that they now “[roll] incessantly, like railway luggage trains… the air one loathsome mass of sultry and foul fog, like smoke” (30). The cloud bodes ill for empire as well, as Ruskin plays on a familiar image of English dominance: “the Empire of England, on which formerly the sun never set, has become one on which he never rises” (33). Thus we eventually are punished—or punish ourselves—for industrial and imperial expansion, with “Blanched Sun,—blighted grass,— blinded man” (33). And the climatic changes for which are responsible give us a preview of the thermodynamically inevitable fate of our planet. The Martians’ effect on the Terran atmosphere is thus all too familiar, accelerating the entropic changes we are already creating for ourselves. The self-aware cannot help but recognize ourselves in the Martians. In this way, the Martians figure metaphorically for humanity and synecdochally for their own planet. By the late-nineteenth century, Mars had long served as a focal point for ecological speculation. Robert Markley tracks a long tradition in which “Mars appears as a kind of environmental thought experiment,” extending back through “the first detailed map of the Martian surface in 1840” all the way to Robinson Crusoe’s prescient and “clear-sighted observation” of the fourth planet (loc 694, 690, 430). With The War of the Worlds, however, we may mark a change in how Mars serves as our planetary doppelganger, for with it, Mars takes shape in our imagination as a “‘dying planet’ … invoked to support competing, even antithetical, views of the fate of our world and its inhabitants: a glorious future of technoscientific scientific progress or an irrevocable fall into environmental devastation, social chaos, and eventual extinction” (Markley loc 37). This view of Mars is bound up in Victorian speculation regarding the fate of humanity, shaped by the widespread embrace of both Darwinian evolutionary theory and the second law of thermodynamics. Wells himself marries the two in various visions of the future that portend the end of humanity. This may come about simply because of the laws of nature— usable energy will decrease, the sun will go out, the conditions of the planet will change, and the species will, like so many others, become

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extinct, giving way to those more adaptable or “plastic.”1 But The War of the Worlds, and to a lesser extent The Time Machine, implicates humanity in speeding the inevitable. Setting Suns & Malthusian Traps The Martians bring home forcefully the fear that the sun is in the process of setting, not only on the British Empire, but on humanity and on the Earth itself. For while they amplify the human-wrought climate change taking place on earth, the situation on Mars seems one not entirely of their making. Like ours, the Martians face climatic challenges that stem from causes they can affect as well as from those they cannot. In part, if not in full, their failure of resources results from the most inevitable of apocalyptic threats—the passage of time. An older planet than earth, Wells understands Mars to be “not only more distant from time’s beginning but nearer its end” (2). The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. (2)

The Martians are thus not only implicated in climate change, but also suffering under effects that they could in no way have prevented; their sun is setting. This thermodynamic inevitability functions axiomatically, rather than illustratively within The War of the Worlds, but readers of The Time Machine will recall the Time Traveller’s final view of a horrifying darkness, the silence of a lifeless world, and the threat of something large and tentacled—almost Martian-like—whose evolution has supplanted our own. Wells’s images of aging planets are certainly imaginative, but he also draws from numerous contemporary hypotheses regarding the projected future of the solar system, notably Pierre Simon LaPlace’s nebular 1

 See “The Limit of Individual Plasticity” in Early Writings.

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hypothesis, which in 1796 posited the origin of the solar system and planets in the cooling of an originary rotating mass of nebular material (see Markely loc 886, 1650). More recently still, William Thomson’s “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat” connected the “secular cooling” of the sun and planets with the nascent science of thermodynamics. And in a rather Wellsian moment, Thomson actually suggests a way out of this thermodynamic fate: “As for the future,” he concludes, “we may say, with … certainty, that inhabitants of the earth cannot continue to enjoy the light and heat essential to their life for many million years longer, unless sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation” (393). The open-endedness of this caveat proved particularly useful to Ernest Rutherford in 1905, as he sought a tactful way to announce the discovery of radiation in the presence of the elderly Thomson, now Lord Kelvin (Brush 43). The Martians look elsewhere for a way out of the thermodynamic bind: Having consumed all that their own planet can provide, they do what Thomson and Darwin, had they ever really talked it out, might have anticipated: they go rummaging in the “great storehouse of creation,” looking for something to eat. In this way, the thermodynamic worries regarding the death of the sun converge with a familiar Malthusian anxiety. Together these stories heighten awareness and anxieties about resource depletion. At the same time, Malthusian narratives routinely mask the ways in which we may exacerbate or create such shortages. To varying degrees, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, and Mansfield Park all reveal anxieties about limited resources and dependence on those outside the system, however construed. At the same time, we saw in these novels how corresponding narratives of English self-sufficiency work to obscure the facts and assuage those anxieties, narratively closing the system and pretending to resource independence. We have also seen how such anxiety may shape our moral interpretation—as the scarcity of resources proves Jane Eyre’s fitness, even as Brontë suggests that mismanagement compounds the Malthusian situation. More like Jane Eyre than it may at first appear, The War of the Worlds suggests a deep-­ seated anxiety about natural limits on available resources suggested by Malthus and, in a different way, by Darwin, while at the same time condemning the manufactured systems that divide these so inequitably. In previous chapters, we have seen the ways in which the imperial resources serve to prop up the dwindling English supplies. Now, however, the proverbial tables have been turned. The Martians defy this traditional mystification. Violently opening the system, they defy their own Malthusian trap and amplify ours.

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Part 2: Narrative Troubles Tech Solutions Whether scarcity is manufactured or inherent in natural law, the Martians’ superior technology seems to provide a way out; invasion—the radical, violent, and ultimately entropic opening of their energetic system—seems to be the answer. They have thus expended considerable energy and ingenuity to create and deploy interplanetary Martian-bearing projectiles, walking machines and the thermodynamically suggestive heat ray. And if that were not formidable enough, they are also developing a flying-­ machine, with which to insure the complete subjugation of the Earth. This large-scale invasion is not, however, their first effort to stave off the effects of resource depletion. Arguably, the challenges they faced on Mars have already made them better users of available resources. Their history of struggle may have made them more efficient in their use of available energies, both at home and abroad. They are what I have elsewhere referred to as “entropic individuals” (Gold 227–31). As such they represent a negative fantasy of postponing thermodynamic inevitability by doubling down on technology. In contradistinction to Joule’s optimistic assessment of living beings as “capable of more work with the same expenditure of fuel” than even the best of steam engines (363, see Chap. 3), Wells seems aware that human physiology is woefully inefficient. The Martians have evolved or remade themselves into far more better users of available energy. By the time they land on earth, they have gone a long way to eliminating the waste inherent in all living systems. Food, as suggested by Boltzmann’s “chemical kitchen,” is but one of many forms of highly processed solar energy (see Chap. 3), and in spite of Joule’s optimism, Victorians understood that processing of all kinds inevitably resulted in energy loss. Wells addresses this necessary inefficiency in imagining Martians who don’t eat or even, properly speaking, process food. Whether the result of evolution or technological self-improvement, their mode of extracting energy from food is far more efficient than any apex predator here on earth. They simply inject the fresh blood of other animals, including humans, directly into their veins. Their bypassing of digestion is itself presented as a more efficient use of available resources. Their bodies are plagued by none of the complex apparatus of digestion, nor by the physical or emotional effects of these systems. And in a surprisingly detached assessment of the process,

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our narrator observes that “the physiological advantages of the practice of injection are undeniable, if one thinks of the tremendous waste of human time and energy occasioned by eating and the digestive process” (100). All those “glands and tubes and organs” (100)! So many troubled livers! So much gastric distress! The Martians have none of it, or any of the moods and emotions connected with bodies that must eat. Nor any of the waste associated with such messy side effects. Moreover, Martian energy efficiency extends to their ability to do without sleep—a capacity that also functions as synecdoche for their evolutionary fitness. Wells maps the larger onto the smaller, noting that “periodical extinction” of sleep is unknown to the Martians, and implying none-too-subtly that species extinction is similarly unlikely (101). But even as they threaten our existence, we recognize in them a fantasy of our future selves. Noting that “the sky is alive with their lights” (122), like one of our great cities, they represent our own hope that science and technology will be our salvation. Even their repression of gastro-intestinally induced emotion evokes the stoicism for which the English have long been renowned. It is not clear, however, that Martian superiority is all technological, for the Martians also epitomize the evolutionary accomplishments we generally claim for ourselves. Even as the first Martian’s exceedingly large head emerges, glistening and round from its canister, we get a glimpse of the “crowning race”—to borrow Tennyson’s apt phrasing (In Memoriam stanza 133). As with their imperial aspirations and their tendency to wreak havoc on “inferior races,” these big-brained possessors of superior tech both reflect and exceed our self-image. Of course, by the end of the novel, we know that neither their technological nor their evolutionary fitness will suffice to save them. And we can read in the failure of their technology, a warning against straying too far from nature. Indeed, their very inattention to the body seems to render them vulnerable to the terran bacteria that ultimately kill them. Meanwhile, their manifest advancedness does not allow a simple distinction between the natural and the technological. And we know that ultimately, even they cannot evade the thermodynamic inevitability at the end of even the best resource management. Invasive Species In a world where entropy and extinction are inevitable, postponement is thus the name of the game. By migrating to Earth in search of energy in

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the form of food, the Martians may be doing no more than what evolutionary biology requires to postpone an extinction that is ultimately inevitable. In such an interpretation, the Martians may also be understood simply as “the most flourishing, or, as they may be called, the dominant species—those which range widely” (Origin 39). Apex predators on earth require a great deal of energy to sustain their life, complexity and mobility. Such predators are nature’s gas guzzlers, absorbing the cumulative energies collected by all those lower on what we used to call the food chain— each link of which will necessarily have inefficiencies in its collection and stores of what was once solar energy. In their quest for energy efficiency, the Martians seem to have sacrificed much of their complexity and mobility: they are now mostly heads with hands, and once they arrive on earth, they must rely almost completely on their technologies to move at all. Of course, these substitutes for bodily complexity require a good deal of energy as well. First and foremost, the Martians must expend considerable energy simply to relocate to an “an environment in which they have no natural predators” (Evans 12). As an invasive species, the Martians are reflected in the red weed they bring with them, which while not an apex predator or particularly mobile in the individual, nonetheless proves remarkably aggressive, growing with astonishing vigor and luxuriance wherever there is water. Together, the Martians and the red weed transform a once-familiar scene “of comfortable white and red houses, interspersed with abundant shady trees” into “the landscape, weird and lurid, of another planet” (115, 116). What once was green is now dead and brown, or replaced by the characteristic blood-­ red of Martian vegetation (102). This transformation of the landscape by an invasive species (also, an invading force) is a familiar Darwinian scene. Such things happen all the time. As Darwin observes, No country can be named in which all the native inhabitants are now so perfectly adapted to each other and to the physical conditions under which they live, that none of them could be still better adapted or improved; for in all countries, the natives have been so far conquered by naturalised productions that they have allowed some foreigners to take firm possession of the land. And as foreigners have thus in every country beaten some of the natives, we may safely conclude that the natives might have been modified with advantage, so as to have better resisted the intruders. (Origin 56)

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Darwin’s phrasing is almost Wellsian—and vice versa. Ecologically as well as politically, natives and foreigners struggle over “firm possession of the land,” that potentially threatens all species in all places. Pulled not from The Descent of Man, but from the Origin of Species, this statement applies equally to peas and pigeons as to people. Neither the land nor the scientific object more broadly can be cordoned off, and the difference between “native” and “naturalised” is only a matter of time. In this way, notions not only of invasion but also of immigration, colonization, and naturalization pepper Darwin’s books, as well as ecological discourse more broadly. How much such linguistic uses inflect how we think about ecology or politics is a subject of much debate—some contending that it is only language, after all; others, that there is only language. Certainly, a phrase such as “invasive species” implies both a perspective and an underlying model of closure. How long does one remain a “foreigner” once one is in “firm possession”? The language of ecology cannot be disentangled from the language of politics. This entanglement is heightened further as Darwin takes up the discussion of intruders again in The Descent of Man, where we find that the struggle for possession is often decided by the “mysterious fact that the first meeting of distinct and separated people generates disease” (238–9). And while the outcome (native v. invader) may seem indeterminate, the scales are emphatically tipped. Darwin’s account suggests that such encounters generally favor the “civilised.” One of Darwin’s sources “speaks of the ‘breath of civilisation as poisonous to savages’” and another attributes such detrimental effects to “changed habits of life, consequent on the advent of Europeans,” that bewilder, dull, and enervate the natives (239). Darwin observes also that “when civilized nations come into contact with barbarians, the struggle is short” and rarely favors the barbarians (238). Of course, in The War of the Worlds, we are the barbarians, and knowing the stats, our narrator is quick to believe that it is “up with humanity” after a very short struggle indeed. In less than two weeks, he characterizes this “fact” as “perfectly obvious” (122). Obvious perhaps, but not true. The artilleryman’s assertion may have “carried absolute conviction” (122), but it was wrong—because the text finds a loophole within Darwin, the “except[ion] where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race” (239). A climate deadly to the Martians lends its aid to humanity and indeed to all of the flora and fauna similarly threatened by Martianogenic climate change. Eventually the Martians, the conquerors, undergo something like

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the familiar “seasoning” undergone by European settlers in new lands, and they succumb to a bacterial infection to which terrestrial animals, including humans, are immune. If, on the one hand, “the implication of taking Darwin seriously [for Wells] is … to recognize the challenge that evolution poses to any claim to ultimate superiority, even that of humanity over nature” (Evans 10), Darwin also serves somewhat paradoxically for Wells, to restore and naturalize humanity’s claim to this earth from which man cannot be ousted, having long since bought “his birthright of the earth” (136) by the innumerable deaths that assured his immunity. I hate to say it, but from a practical point of view, it matters little whether we imagine humanity vis a vis the Martians as barbarians coming into contact with a civilized nation or as an indigenous species to whom a deadly climate lends its aid: neither naturalizing narrative inspires us to do anything. Moreover, the birthright thesis seems to reinstate the certainty and closure we come to expect from the novel, leaving us secure in the sense that the earth is ours “against all comers” (136). We Are All Martians The general slipperiness of Wells’s imaginary, however, makes such a certainty impossible to sustain. Even as we confront ourselves as “natives” or “barbarians,” we must also recognize ourselves as Martians. Even as we succumb to their designs upon Earth, we are reminded that they are doing no more than we have done, or would have done, or are in the process of doing. Here “we” are British or, at any rate, European humanity, and the absurdity of our attitudes toward the colonial other, combines with our mystifying fantasies of systemic closure, to account for our complete failure to anticipate the Martian invasion: “At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise” (1). Once we actually meet them, the increasingly clear absurdity of imagining humans going to Mars as “a missionary enterprise” serves as a continual critique of European expansion as imagined, say, by the insufficiently energetic St. John Rivers (see Chap. 6). British attitudes toward colonial others are presented as clear failures of imagination and sympathy. Thus the narrator abjures us in terms at once Darwinian and imperialistic, to temper our judgment of the Martians and to reevaluate our assessment of ourselves: How poorly “terrestrial men” predict the attitudes of their “inferiors”! And what horrors have been wrought by our own

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so-called “missionary enterprise[s].” Taking the plight of the Tasmanians, who were declared extinct in 1876, as the inspiration for the War of the Worlds (Brantlinger 15–16), Wells incorporates a clear critique of the ecological effects of imperialism in his argument that the Martians are (no worse than) us: And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit? (3)

Wells’s efforts here are at once laudable and telling. This apparently straightforward critique embeds a variety of problematic undercurrents, not the least of which is the implication that it’s ok for the Martians to do it, because we have. The narrator naturalizes this assumption by suggesting the “ruthless and utter destruction” is the work of “our own species,” but his choice to attribute the near genocide of the Tasmanians to “European immigrants” may easily be understood as sidestepping, or at least diffusing, direct British responsibility. Worse, the narrator’s apparently unself-conscious reference to the “inferior races” of humanity precludes the sort of united-humanity fantasy that will become a staple of later science fiction, wherein finding other life in the universe (as Deanna Troi puts it) “unites humanity in a way no one ever thought possible.”2 After all, the Tasmanians are human and indeed, are synecdochal for humanity more broadly. But the huge gaff regarding the “human likeness” of the Tasmanians, signals that even within the narrator’s anti-­ extinction narrative, there remains an enduring thread of presumptive racism. The Trouble with Apocalypse Within The War of the Worlds, however, the imminent demise of humanity at once stands in for and distracts us from the details of our intra-species troubles. And if, by ultimately sparing humanity, the novel fails to bring its promised apocalypse to fruition, it is worth emphasizing that humanity 2

 Star Trek: First Contact, Paramount Pictures, 1996.

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itself does nothing to bring about this result. Whether deploying our inferior weaponry, hatching elaborate plans for a subterranean future, or bewailing the sins of man, we expend our energies to little effect. This, Wells suggests, is our usual response to apocalypse. For during the interim in which it seems pretty clearly “up” with humanity, we are invited to consider the usefulness of several familiar modes of narrating such a troubling eventuality. Apocalyptic narrative, it seems, attends inevitably upon ecological discourse, “provid[ing] an emotionally charged frame of reference within which complex, long-term issues are reduced to monocausal crises” (Garrard 104)—for better or worse. Mostly worse. And never more so than in the unproductive energies of the curate who proves such a poor companion in disaster: “This must be the beginning of the end. …The end! The great and terrible day of the Lord! When men shall call upon the mountains and the rocks to fall upon them and hide them—hide them from the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne!”(54). The curate interprets the Martians as “God’s ministers” and their arrival as punishment for the sins of mankind. It is further characteristic of such “tragic apocalyptic rhetoric” that there have been warnings (Garrard 89). But whether these come from the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah or the fossil evidence of extinct species, we have failed to heed them and the danger “is not only imminent, but already well under way” (Garrard 95). Further, the narrator is implicated in the curate’s world view, toward the end of novel, when he is found “singing some insane doggerel about ‘The Last Man Left Alive! Hurrah! The Last Man Left Alive!’” (139); he lacks only the sandwich board that would make the picture complete. Having convinced himself “that mankind had been swept out of existence” (118), he plays out one of the most familiar of apocalyptic narratives: the “last man scenario” (Brantlinger 15). Wells himself comments on two such “last man” narratives: Thomas Hood’s poem “The Last Man” (1826), which he finds to be a “grotesquely fearful” travesty of Thomas Cambell’s 1823 poem of the same name (EW 150, 172). In the earlier poem, the last man commends his spirit to God; in the latter, the last two, a hangman and a beggar meet. The former, ironically irritated by the other’s presumption, hangs the latter only to find himself alone, on the verge of suicide, with “not another man alive/In the world, to pull [his] legs!” and hasten his death. Humanity succumbs to pestilence in Hood’s poem; to numerous deaths in Campbell’s, though the last man recognizes the sun itself as a “twin in death,” the sun’s “face is cold, [its] race is run.”

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In The War of the Worlds, the “last man” faces only the end of humanity, but this smaller end is entangled with the greater, the death of the sun presaged by the coming of the Martians. Wells’s concern, however, is with the problems of the proleptic. For his narrator is rapidly disillusioned and his doggerel shortly falsified; he is by no means the last man. Similarly falsified is his conviction that he is the first to come upon the defeated Martians. Indeed, “so far from my being the first discoverer of the Martian overthrow, several such wanderers” had made the discovery before him and informed the rest of the world (138). Even as the information is shared, so is the lost fantasy of being the first discoverer or sole survivor. Somewhat paradoxically, the fantasy of being the “last man” is a shared one. The individual experience is also collective. Thinking of ourselves collectively—as a species—has its own problems, however, as suggested by another familiar response to the prospect of species extinction: the artilleryman’s Darwinistic worldview. Wells suggests just how tempting such a scientistic view can be. While the curate’s general uselessness as a companion highlights the ineffectiveness of his perspective, the artilleryman deploys our already low opinion of the curate and all his ilk to mask the similar problems of his own. Echoing the narrator’s own impressions—“What good is religion if it collapses under calamity?” (54)—the artilleryman condemns all “those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, [who] always make for a sort of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and submit to persecution and the will of the Lord” (126). He insists rather that “we must keep up our science— learn more,” and his views, seemingly built upon a strong foundation of military experience and scientific principles, prove absolutely compelling—and so manly (127). The artilleryman himself seems to feel disproportionately enthusiastic, as he demands, “Aren’t you satisfied that it is up with humanity?” The narrator cannot resist such “absolute conviction” and, already primed to feel “an animal among the animals” (116), is instantly persuaded of a “fact perfectly obvious so soon as he spoke” (122), but which is ultimately proved incorrect. More subtle and more tempting than the curate’s, the artilleryman’s narrative nonetheless turns out to be at least as troubling. His plan for species survival is as ruthless as nature’s: “Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It’s a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race” (127). The degree to which this represents a natural division of humans is exactly the degree to which nature proves itself inhumane. John

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Stuart Mill, for one, compares an abstract and decidedly nasty nature to “the greatest monsters whom we read of” (Mill 29), inflicting torture and death as a matter of routine, the latter, “once to every being that lives” (Mill 28). Nature acts, as the artilleryman plans to and as the Martians already have, with a “supercilious disregard of both mercy and justice,” making no distinction between the noble and the mean, enacting effects neither as reward for the former, nor punishment for the latter (Mill 29). With such depictions, Mill’s 1874 essay “On Nature” seeks to demonstrate that the evocation of “nature” as a model of “what ought to be” is at best of limited use, at worst, “one of the most copious sources of false taste, false philosophy, false morality, and even bad law” [14, 3]. Wells, in turn, continues the work, complicating the moral stance that “natural” so often implies, demonstrating the range of consequences of a Darwinian model, suggesting its misuses, undermining the stability of its terms, and troubling too-simple exhortations to let nature be our guide. Ultimately, the artilleryman’s narrative proves as unproductive as the curate’s. His turns out to be a form of proleptic elegy: it presumes its conclusion, “mourn[ing] the lost object before it is completely lost” (Brantlinger 4). Declaring “We’re down; we’re beat,” the artilleryman anticipates an extinction that is, in fact, not yet complete. The Victorians had done the same with the declared extinction of the Tasmanians. Prolepsis in turn gives way to prescription, as the artilleryman, apparently the “energetic regenerator of his species” (130), proceeds enthusiastically to make plans. Such is the artilleryman’s eloquence that the narrator is instantly persuaded and goes right to work on an astonishing scheme for the survival of a select few. We may recognize in the artilleryman something akin to a culture of busyness: we feel better doing something, whether that something leads to a desired outcome or not. Eventually, however, the narrator becomes aware of the gulf between the rhetoric of the artilleryman and his accomplishments, for ultimately they manage only to dig a little hole and celebrate their accomplishment over a game of poker played for “parish points” (130). Amazed at having been thus enticed, the narrator later marvels at just how comforting he found all this post-apocalyptic planning and business: “Strange mind of man! that, with our species upon the edge of extermination or appalling degradation,” they had been able to enjoy a bit of a holiday over cards and cigars (130). The novel thus suggests that scientistic prescription can be as counterproductive as resignation, leading to a misdirection of available energies and a paradoxically busy complacency.

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Having thus staged the inefficacy of both religious and scientistic narratives of apocalypse, Wells further indicts his own narrator and with him, those of us who live in the quiet of an approach to catastrophe. Back in his home after the Martian defeat, the narrator stands before his former writings “on the probable development of Moral Ideas with the development of the civilising process” (142). Having witnessed the Martian invasion, with all of its implied possible futures for humanity—among these both extinction and dehumanization—such speculation seems absurd and self-­ indulgent. As the narrator and the reader who reads with him, revisit these justly “abandoned arguments” (142), we are thoroughly implicated in the problematic prognostication already satirized in the novel. His final prophecy, “In about two hundred years…we may expect——,” is left unfinished and unfinishable (142). The War of the Worlds thus deploys and troubles a remarkable range of narratological strategies for dealing with large-scale climate change. As we have seen, the novel expresses “impatien[ce] with two responses [heard] all too frequently to the horrors of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene…a comic faith in technofixes [and a] position that the game is over” (Haraway 3). The novel tests and rejects the usefulness of apocalyptic narrative, both religious and scientistic, as well as a paradoxically shared sense of being the “last man left alive” (118). And the Martians themselves undermine any lingering faith in the salvation to be found in technology. We are left only with uncertainty and a wide-scale sense that if we are to contend with large-scale catastrophe, we are somehow telling the wrong stories.

Part 3: A Novel Experiment And yet, Wells is still telling stories. Not particularly comforting stories, however. This novel’s unnerving effect is, of course, appropriate and likely intentional; no one expects a Martian invasion to be a walk in the park. But the effect is also ecological—in the sense evoked by Tim Morton’s “ecological thought.” The War of the Worlds thinks big, as well as intimately and infinitesimally, often at the same time. It is unsettling at every scale. It stages an encounter with a very strange stranger—one whose strangeness increases with intimacy and who, by the magic of metaphor, reveals the strangeness of ourselves. Like other such imaginings of the extraterrestrial, Wells provides a “fantasy point from which the reader herself… can achieve the ‘impossible’ viewpoint of space” (Morton ET 301).

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Wells’s novel begins with such an impossible point of view, speculating in assured tones about things it cannot know. His readers find themselves with little to cling to—not even a narrator with whom we can identify, as our comfortable certainties regarding our place in the universe are whittled away. Such an “impossible” viewpoint, as Timothy Morton argues, “is a cornerstone of the ecological thought” (ET 301). While there can be no doubt that Wells’s stories partake of the novelistic structures that worried us in earlier chapters, with all the barriers they present to more ecological thinking, we can also see innovations in the ways Wells rethinks the novel and its inhabitants. Resisting the drive to closure that seems to shape the Victorian novel, Wells’s scientific romances are decidedly open and open ended—insistent that their stories are but part of a much bigger picture. He further undermines the model of the bounded individual whose development had so long preoccupied the novel (see Chap. 2). His characters are far more indeterminate than may be comfortable. His readers are trained to embrace ultimate ignorance as a precondition of better knowledge and to seek out the strange, the inexplicable, and the dissonant. The Open Book To pick up any of Wells’s scientific romances at the tail end of the nineteenth century, having just put down, say, Bleak House or Middlemarch or even Dracula, is to be immediately struck by how light the volume feels. In a small way, it’s like being transported to Mars, where the weight of any object is less than 40% of its weight on Earth.3 In comparison to the grand narratives of the mid-nineteenth century, the brevity of Wells’s novels are at once refreshing and suggestive. If the earlier novels grew, in part, in an effort to achieve closure—to contain the whole of what was conceived as the system—The War of the Worlds is a novel simply not trying to have it all. Contrary to the vast scope implied by the title, the book itself is small, intimate, overwhelmingly complex, and open ended. Perhaps it is the very enormity of its proclaimed scope that makes openness imperative. In any 3  Actually, the longest of Wells’s 1890s scientific romances, The War of the Worlds is somewhere between 15% and 20% the size of Middlemarch. Its weight would be closer to the weight of Middlemarch on the moon. About half the length of The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine has something like Middlemarch’s weight on Pluto. Perhaps the shortening of the novel at the fin-de-siècle reflects a subconscious desire to lessen the amount of work against gravity required of readers who may feel that usable energy is growing scarce. Maybe. Maybe not.

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case, The War of the Worlds undermines persistent fantasies of closure, self-­ sufficiency, and stability, in its brevity as well as in its plot and its narrative strategies. In doing so, it reminds us that energy—perhaps even life—is never innocent: it has always been something somewhere and it is always going to be something somewhere. It has a history and a future. Novelistic closure tends to obscure this history and future. And, if the happy ending is among the most obvious efforts at novelistic closure, the ambivalence at the end of The War of the Worlds is conspicuous. The narrator, in his wide-ranging musings, speculates that “It may be, on the other hand, that the destruction of the Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the future ordained” (145). Having narrowly escaped the Martian invasion, we are not allowed to celebrate. Instead, we are pulled up short, reminded of the inadvisability, indeed, the impossibility of prediction. Even the binary certitude of them/us cannot be sustained under the pressure of thermodynamic and evolutionary narrative. The depletion of energy resources that drives the Martians off their own planet seems an intractable certitude. For Wells, as for Darwin, the optimistic picture of the very abundance and variety of life in a world is mitigated by the projected failure of all earthly resources as the sun slowly cools and earthly life is at an end. But within The War of the Worlds, this too appears as a significant but not ultimate moment in our future history. “When the slow cooling of the sun makes this earth uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the thread of life that has begun here will have streamed out and caught our sister planet within its toils” (145). And while this may seem like a victory, the “thread of life” is decidedly not us or even terran life as we know it. If we survive, evolution guarantees that it will not be as ourselves. As the planet must change, we will change with it, or far more likely, become extinct. Wells’s narrator, however, finds secular consolation in the continuance of life itself: “Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of life spreading slowly from this little seed bed of the solar system throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space” (145). When this planet becomes uninhabitable by virtue of thermodynamic inevitability, we may hope that humanity is prepared to move outward. Or someone will. Or something. Under the shadow of thermodynamic inevitability, until the final heat death of the universe, when all usable energy has been converted to heat at uniform temperature and no processes are possible, all endings must seem at best provisional. Would it be the extinction of humanity? Would it be the end of terrestrial life? Or, would it be of life itself? Each of these

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endings is more final than the last—implying that even finality is a matter of degree and perspective. No wonder the narrator ends plagued by an “abiding sense of doubt and insecurity” and the sense that the restored scenes of ordinary life are somehow “vague and unreal” (145). Yet that is the world we must live in when we put down the novel. A world that is partial, provisional, always in motion, doubtful, insecure, vague and unreal, material and real. And to continue to live in it, we need to become something other than ourselves. Rethinking the Individual Among the most blatant of Wells’s deviations from the general aspirations of the Victorian novel can be found in his revamping of the individual character, and with it, the meaning of the human. We have seen repeatedly how the construct of the isolated and independent individual depends upon and reinforces impossible fantasies of thermodynamic closure. And yet, the development of individual character has been so valued in traditional literature that it may seem the be-all and end-all of the novel itself. Even now, Britannica.com opens its entry on “character” with a powerful judgment on what a novel should be: The inferior novelist tends to be preoccupied with plot; to the superior novelist the convolutions of the human personality, under the stress of artfully selected experience, are the chief fascination.

By such a reckoning, Wells is an inferior novelist; Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Charles Dickens, very superior ones. An overwhelmingly human perspective seems to dominate Great Expectations and Jane Eyre, as the “I” converges with the “eye” in the first-person narration. And even the shifting perspectives of Austen’s free indirect discourse remain firmly entrenched in human time and length scales, in human culture, in the apparently stable perspectives of human individuals. Knowing that these time and length scales represent only a tiny part of a universe of energetic entanglements, we have worked in previous chapters to shift our readerly preoccupations, to open up, invert, and entangle the novel of character, pursuing its tendrils and tangents to give it a shape more unwieldy, but also more ecological. But the “convolutions of the human personality” that seem to preoccupy Austen, Brontë, and Dickens are not to be found in Wells, and arguably, The War of the Worlds does not allow us to do

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otherwise than pursue the very real entanglements by which the individual depends upon the larger system and its inhabitants. Wells’s individuals are consistently and intentionally indeterminate. It is perhaps significant that, of the four novels he published between 1895 and 1898, the most elaborately delineated characters are associated with the most horrific of interspecies interactions in The Island of Dr. Moreau. The Time Machine, in proto-allegorical fashion, figures its protagonist as simply the Time Traveler. And just prior to the publication of the War of the Worlds, Pearson’s Magazine had published another of Wells’s serial fictions, featuring an invisible man, who, upon regaining visibility, is immediately effaced.4 Although the narrator of the War of the Worlds is not literally invisible, he is (as my students have complained) frustratingly hard to picture. He further digresses for four chapters to recount second-hand, the adventures of his similarly under-developed younger brother (evoking a resounding chorus of “what’s that about?”). Decidedly not a novel of character, the War of the Worlds requires different work from us. Demanding a perspectival agility that may provide a pattern for a more ecological way of thinking, Wells’s “I” is more mobile and his realism less familiar, more unreal. We hardly know on whom to focus; the narrator is little more than an eye unmoored from its “I.” And while this confirms, or more likely establishes, a feature of science fiction often criticized by the gatekeepers of the “literary”—that is, that it doesn’t adequately develop its characters—it is possible to understand Wells as having already essayed what our willfully ecological readings of the bildungsroman have worked to do. The novel’s uncertain and shifting point of view, and its slippery and exuberantly mixed metaphors, even its brevity, work to create a reader who inhabits the world differently, as The War of the Worlds can be read as a novel about a human trying to get away from his entrenched perspective—with only, perhaps inevitably, partial success. Cognitive Dissonance, Perspectival Agility Consistent with its investments in energy concepts even as it works against notions of systemic closure, The War of the Worlds thus insists upon a perspectival ability that promotes a sense of history that exceeds our perception, that applies to systems at every scale, that insists upon radical 4  The main character in The Invisible Man initiates a reign of terror and ends dead and battered, with his face covered in a sheet.

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entanglement and requires perpetual transformation. The War of the Worlds requires that we recognize the material existence of a planet even as we see the layers upon layers of representation that make up a world. Wells suggests that we need not only a view of the world, but many shifting views within it—some of which we will find decidedly uncomfortable. Thus he not only takes us out of ourselves, asking us to consider how our world looks to the watchers on Mars, but also requires us to inhabit multiple, sometimes rapidly changing perspectives, within our world. He not only holds up a Martian mirror to reveal how we are implicated in the extinction of other peoples and species and how our “civilization … threatens ultimately to be consumed by its own rapaciousness” (Markley), but also repeatedly revisits our relations to the other inhabitants of this dying planet of ours. He repeatedly undermines our trust in comfortable narration (even scientific ones) and indeed, of the premises and oppositions that inform them. We have seen ourselves as the scourge of the Tasmanians, the dodo, and the bison, even as we face a like extinction. It does not insist that we replace one conclusive truth with a better one, but rather that we rethink the shape of truth itself, as over and again, we are asked to feel ourselves “no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel” (116). Perhaps nothing so thoroughly instills this feeling as the realization that to the Martians, we look like dinner—like sources of energy rather than sinks. Through such a retrospective lens, our own dinners seem patently absurd. Reflecting on the reassurance he gives his wife over “the last civilised dinner I was to eat for very many strange and terrible days” the narrator affirms his likeness to the dodo. He muses, “So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food. ‘We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear’” (24). Elsewhere, the Martians’ attack on humanity is linked to late-Victorian changes in the agricultural treatment of insects, notably the increased use of arsenic-based insecticides after the global Colorado beetle scare came home to England in 1877 (Clark 135, 139). Like these insects, the Martians are a species-­threatening invader, even as they deploy an insecticidal equivalent in their attack on the London suburbs, spreading a “strange stifling vapour over the Londonward country” and “setting about it as methodically as men might smoke out a wasps’ nest” (70). At the same time that the human reader thus envisions himself as a technologically armed invader, he also sees

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himself as the pests he seeks to eradicate. The Victorian duster of crops figures synechdocally for humanity’s treatment of nonhuman nature and metaphorically for British imperialism—apparently disparate acts which are nonetheless both struggles for available energies. Wells’s metaphors are consistently slippery in this way, asking us to identify both with the colonizer and the colonized, across lines of species, race, nation, scale, and even planetary origin. Familiar things are rendered unfamiliar for both the narrator and the reader, creating what we will come to call “cognitive dissonance,” a term that originates in psychology but which has been recognized as a key effect of science fiction, and indeed, of close reading. It refers to the uncomfortable experience of sustaining inconsistent, even contradictory, ideas at the same time. But Wells goes even further—not only producing, but also staging the production of cognitive dissonance and what is less talked about, a subsequent refamiliarization. We have, Wells suggests, a great capacity for changing our point of view. And though here, we hope to cultivate this capacity, it can be brought on rapidly, completely without conscious intention, in response to an emergency. The narrator recounts such a cognitive shift in the moments he makes his near-escape from the heat-ray, as terror reshapes the world, animating a precipitate and unthinking flight: A few minutes before, there had only been three real things before me—the immensity of the night and space and nature, my own feebleness and anguish, and the near approach of death. Now it was as if something turned over, and the point of view altered abruptly. There was no sensible transition from one state of mind to the other. I was immediately the self of every day again—a decent, ordinary citizen. (21)

His point of view having shifted rapidly to flight mode, it shifts back just as rapidly, falling away “like a garment,” along with the narrator’s lost hat and dislodged collar. Cognitive dissonance has been temporary and useful. It is also about to become paradoxically familiar. At first, the narrator may marvel that “this was the little world in which I had been living securely for years, this fiery chaos!” but he soon comes to expect such chaos. No wonder! He has seen how quickly the Martian Heat-Ray can transform a town into a “heap of fiery ruins” (40). But even these expectations are undermined, for emerging into the daylight from his refuge in a ruined house, he finds “a startling vision of unfamiliar things” (116). Having expected to find the town in ruins (the

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usual entropic aftermath of a military invasion), he finds instead the weird and lurid red-tinged Martian landscape (116) (the result of the complex energetic entanglements of invasive species, which intervene in the forms energy may take on its way to ultimate entropy). The experience itself, he realizes, is a common one, indeed “one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well” (116). What has changed is not so much the scene as his perspective within it: “I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his borrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navies digging the foundations of a house” (116). And while this may or may not accurately reflect the rabbit’s feelings on the occasion, it is nonetheless significant that the narrator undergoes this cognitive process. For, while he claims that “so soon as this strangeness had been realized it passed,” its passing seems less the restoration of manly feelings, and more the embrace of those lapine. His dominant motive has become hunger, and finding a patch of garden, he moves, first knee- and then neck-deep, through the red weed, its density providing him with “a reassuring sense of hiding” (116). He has, it seems, gotten in touch with his inner rabbit. At the same time, the rabbit’s dismay may remind us of a difficult but important scientific moment of non-recognition. It echoes, for example, Darwin’s momentary identification with the savage similarly confounded, as Darwin hopes for a time “when we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as something wholly beyond his comprehension” (Origin 301). Putting aside for the moment Darwin’s condescension toward the savage, and the fact that elsewhere he resists this identification,5 the moment is consistent with Darwin’s “golden rule” of recording facts in opposition to his knowledge or experience (see Prologue). It suggests the importance of acknowledging ignorance, the cognitive dissonance of observing something wholly new, the usefulness of trying to adopt the perspective of another, and the unlikelihood of ­sustaining such a perspective for long. We need to look at the ship with total incomprehension if we hope for any kind of comprehension. The willingness to do so is essential to “a truly scientific attitude,” which 5  I am thinking, of course, of the penultimate paragraph of the Descent: “For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon, who descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs—as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions” (Descent 404).

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according to Timothy Morton “means not believing everything you think. This means that your thinking keeps encountering nonidentical phenomena, things you can’t put in a box” (ET 230). Further, and more like the dodo confronting a ship full of hungry sailors, Darwin’s savage confronting a ship implicates the scientific project in the imperial one, even as it suggests we seek out the cognitive dissonance of occupying, however temporarily, a new perspective that undermines what we think we can put in a box. Not putting things in boxes is just what resisting the conceptual drive to closure is all about. And repeated encounters with such out-of-the-box “nonidentical phenomena” structure Wells’s book at the macro level and the micro, as it stages its more provisional form of disillusionment, alternating between de- and re-familiarizing. As the narrator treks from a space wholly alien back to one that is merely the “wreckage of the familiar,” the experience of cognitive dissonance itself becomes the norm. Over and over, he remarks the strangeness of things. The “mind of man” (playing cards on the verge of extermination) and the quiet of a city Sunday are strange right alongside Martian physiology and technology, as is the “strange atmosphere” that makes it hard for Martians to breath. By the end, the process of assimilating the strange is paradoxically familiar. The return to the “self of every day” after a momentary empathetic connection to the rabbit or the wasp or the profound sense of being an “animal among animals” is perhaps unavoidable, as perhaps is the return to ourselves that follows even Wells’s grand vision of life spreading into the reaches of the vastness of sidereal space. But perhaps we return to a self that is somewhat changed. Shifting Alliances, Provisional Knowledge Meanwhile, as I have begun to suggest above, the novel reiterates globally this local pattern of realization and return, rethinking its systems and insisting that all points of view are temporary and provisional. Promising a “great disillusionment,” Wells instead stages many small ones. The War of the Worlds repeatedly dislocates the reader’s assumptions of superiority and safety, but it does so provisionally and uncertainly. Re-deploying the streak of political Darwinism that runs throughout the late-Victorian invasion story, he certainly manages “to invert all its nationalist assumptions” (Evans 10). This is a key corrective to the problematics of imagining the nation as a closed and independent system, which, as we have seen in the

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previous chapters, support our misapprehensions about what is energetically possible and elide the vast network of energies that support such an apparently independent system. But for all that we have had to reevaluate our place in the world and the universe, we continue to be implicated in our old beliefs and failures. Having identified with the alien invaders, recognized the damage wrought by his own species and race, and empathized with other living occupants of the planet, our narrator nonetheless lapses into nationalistic and anthropocentric thinking. While he may cast a satirical eye over the poor woman who seems to think the French as frightful as the Martians (85), while he may exhort us not to judge the Martians too harshly, his thinking regresses once the danger is past. The narrator’s very incapacity to fully abandon his old ways of thinking suggests that necessary disillusionment is itself provisional and momentary, though we can perhaps stage its useful recurrences—perhaps a more practicable, even more palatable, model of ecological sensitivity than that evinced by the rare person who can sustain a deeply ecological view of the world. It is perhaps troubling that as the narrator returns to the self of every day, his familiar ways of thinking evoke the same Darwinian narrative that he has indicted in the artilleryman as well as in the Judeo-Christian narrative of inevitability parodied in the curate’s apocalyptic wailings. Coming upon a dozen Martians, “stark and silent and laid in a row,” he exclaims, in what I take to be rising tones, slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth. (136)

Thus the Martians are done in by a variety of discourses. They are punished for their indifference to nature, which they thought they had left behind. They are punished by God, by his microscopic angels of death. And, though the persistent “put upon this earth” seems at odds with Darwinian narratives of co-development, they are exterminated by natural selection: These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of things—taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many—those

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that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance—our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain. (136).

Promiscuously mixing the language of war (invaders, allies, overthrow), apocalypse (irrevocably doomed, a billion deaths), religion (bought his birthright), traditional and modern medicine (germs, resisting power, immune, bacteria), and Darwinian evolution (prehuman ancestors, natural selection, struggle), Wells suggests that all of these language sets and more are available to us at each utterance, and that we may mix them to great, but multiple, effects. Thus, the very assertion of humanity’s birthright, which seems to fix man at the rightful center of an environment in which even the bacteria serve his ends, also suggests a rather different view of humanity’s relation to nonhuman nature. “Microscopic allies” suggests our dependence on nonhuman life. Allying ourselves with bacteria, we also identify with them—however momentarily. As the typhus and Jane Eyre thrive together, so has humanity thrived in a coordinated dance of death with terrestrial bacteria. And the fact that our current allies were once responsible for “a billion deaths” suggests a long and shifting series of relationships among living beings. Similarly, the Martians themselves, responsible for so much death and still a threat, may be understood as benefactors. A competitor is not simply a competitor, but an ally or a teacher. And so, the Martians prove allies in the battle, as it were, against the inevitable cooling of the sun. As these relationships change, so too does our sense of ourselves and the world we inhabit. Throughout The War of the Worlds, Wells moves us among the terms of numerous binaries that seem to govern our relationships with nonhuman nature. We are sometimes the subject and sometimes the object of study, the colonizer and the colonized, the perpetrator and victim of ecological devastation and species extinction. We are inextricably bound to both natural and social systems that allow and enable study and colonization and species extinction. And we have been so since the beginning. The same opening passage in which the novel promises a movement from ignorance to knowledge also undermines the stability of

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that knowledge. It sets up knowledge as not stable or achievable in any sense that implies finality, but rather, perpetually partial and provisional and in excess of our perceptions: No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. (1)

Wells creates here what David Evans calls a “delirious dislocation of perspective” (10) by inducing the reader to identify with multiple actors at multiple scales in a complex network of mutual relations, which are all ultimately relations of energy exchange. If “the infusoria under the microscope,” have been undeniably anthropomorphized, the capacity to see our “little affairs” as like theirs is also a step toward acknowledging a likeness-­ in-­difference, as well as a subjectivity in the nonhuman other. We are at once intelligent and ignorant, giant and tiny, watchers and watched, the man with a microscope and the infusoria beneath it, conducting our “little affairs” as we too “swarm and multiply” over a “world” that is also a “globe,” itself and its own miniaturization, a real thing hurtling through space, along with others like it, as well as a representation, metaphor and synecdoche. If the novel thus gives us nowhere to stand, nowhere to plant our proverbial feet and exert a force large enough to move the world or subject another, it nonetheless gives us a host of subject(ive) positions to adopt as we embrace the cognitive dissonance. This mobility of perspective can

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teach us a great deal about ourselves. Formerly “serene in their assurance of their empire over matter,” the human (British, imperial) reader is also forced to confront the close connection between science, imperialism and the domination of nature. With the advent of the Martians, we have certainly seen how pretentious were any missionary aspirations we may have toward the men on Mars. By analogy, we may even see that missionary intentions here on Earth are similarly pretentious. However, if we are fully engrossed by this auspicious shift in our understanding, we may miss another shift, at least as important: “No phase of anthropomorphism is more naive than the supposition of men on Mars,” Wells writes in an 1896 essay that contemplates the possibility of “Intelligence on Mars.”6 Life seems likely. Intelligence, sure. But that it should be in the form of anything like men, considering all the possible paths of evolution not taken on Earth, let alone on another planet, is patently absurd. Nor are we safe to assume that Martians represent a more advanced version of ourselves—the “crowning race” that, as I have suggested above, they sometimes seem. Indeed to us, they may be more like the hungry sailors, the busy navvies, and the ship are to the dodo, the rabbit, and the savage—completely beyond our categories of comprehension. We do not, perhaps cannot, even know what it is that we are ignorant of. But we can presume, as Wells puts it, that “Our conscious relations to the environment are only a small part of the extent to which the environment affects us” (EW 178). Our knowledge is always partial. And indeed, the reader’s simultaneous identification with both the microscope-wielding human and the infusoria he studies, suggests that science itself is unable to maintain a stable singleness of perspective or its proclaimed objectivity. The shape of knowledge itself must change, as the presumed independence of subject and object gives over to the Janus quality of the subject, which may refer to the one who studies or that which is studied. Not only does what constitute knowledge depend on the perspective we adopt, Wells suggests that there are positions unavailable to us. It thus becomes significant that he never gives us a Martian perspective on things. To do so would be naive. It would be, in a remote sense, to anthropomorphize even if only at the level of sense perception. After all, as Wells speculates, “has the universe no facets other than those she turns to man?” (EW “Int. on Mars” 177). For as long as we remain the products

6

 Saturday Review, April 4, 1896. Reprinted in Early Writings.

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of an earthbound evolution, we maintain the sensory limitations that attach to the accidents of that evolutionary path. There will always be more out there than we can know. Someday, we may even discover something that qualifies and troubles the laws of thermodynamics as we now understand them.7 But perhaps our acclimation to the frequent shifting and decentering of perspective wherein cognitive dissonance becomes the norm may be a route to a new view of what it means to understand. The War of the Worlds does not so much articulate, but forces out of us, a more provisional, open, ecological way of knowing, as disillusionment itself becomes the perpetual process of re-visioning, of substituting one partial truth for another or layering many such narratives in the search for increased truthiness. And it is in this increased agility of perspective, rather than in some climactic conclusion, that Wells’s novel ventures on an ecological vision that may suit an imperfect, often stubborn, humanity living in a world of rapid, even violent, climate change, in which we are undoubtedly implicated but which we can never fully predict or control.

7  One might consider the advent of general and special relativity as offering such qualifications, especially Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2, which identifies mass as energy in another form and quantifies this equivalence.



An Afterword on Closure

Living in the COVID pandemic, many familiar things have become strange. In addition to the enormous threats to lives and livelihoods, the pressures of a prudent paranoia have created a kind of cognitive dissonance. Actions that felt natural for so long—hugging loved ones, popping into a grocery store, teaching in a classroom, and so many more—suddenly became troubling, even threatening. Their meanings have changed, making strange even very recent representations of humans acting, as we then thought, naturally: Whether Dee Dee and Frankie do the locomotion unmasked on bikini beach or the diplomats on Madame Secretary greet each other with handshakes, they are met in my house with a mock-­ shocked chorus of “what are they doing?!” The intimacies of The Vampire Diaries prove at least as unnerving as the less common behaviors of the undead, even as the corpuscle shots of Bram Stoker’s Dracula evoke a disease Francis Ford Coppola likely had no thought of back in 1992. Perhaps Michael Crighton (or Jeff Goldblum) had an inkling; as Ian Malcolm reminds us in Jurassic Park, “Life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously” (Crighton 178). COVID-19—like typhus in Jane Eyre and malaria in Great Expectation—is life, painfully crashing the barriers we may have believed in, breaking barriers of species and nation and individual, and revealing the connections we ignore at our peril, reminding us that the closed systems we have imagined were always chimerical. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. J. Gold, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68604-8

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Both the novel and the laws of thermodynamics are complicit in these pervasive illusions of closure to which we cling. And both provide a corrective, if not actually a cure, that we now need with new urgency as the problematics of closure are writ large across the political scene. This need struck me with renewed force as Joe Biden, accepting his nomination as Democratic candidate for President, identified four crises with which we as a nation are currently grappling: And now history has delivered us to one of the most difficult moments America has ever faced. Four historic crises. All at the same time. A perfect storm. The worst pandemic in over 100 years. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The most compelling call for racial justice since the 60’s. And the undeniable realities and…accelerating threats of climate change. (CNN.com)

Indeed, all four of these crises seem to me bound up with the problem of believing too strongly in our own mythologies. In Novel Ecologies, we have considered at length the challenge of imagining ourselves as entangled elements in an open set of open ecologies. I confess to moments, however, when writing this book seemed like tilting at the wrong windmill, as the Trump regime rapidly cut away at human rights and human dignity and brought long-standing problems of human injustice to the fore. But of course, this has always been the dominant way of thinking about what we call our environment, imagining the natural world as the stage set against which we act and which is ours to do with what we please. Even Mr. Biden places climate change last on his list—though maybe this position signals its all-encompassing urgency and misleading subtlety. But climate change and the pandemic are inextricably linked to each other and to the many apparently disparate systems that shape how we live in the world, our treatment of one another, our distribution of resources, each more dangerous because of our cultivated ability to deny these “undeniable realities.” Even the notion of nationhood with which we are asked to face our current crises has become a subject for the bullhorn and the bully pulpit. The spread of the disease has meant to some that we have to double down on our borders, and insist ever more vigilantly on who is not us; these voices have magnified our differences and filled our airwaves with data that magnificently misses the point. To others, the rapid global spread has emphasized—as the study of ecology and energy must do—how

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impossible it is to thus artificially divide the world. Since the Columbian exchange, we have witnessed the increasingly accelerated movement of life of all sorts across the barriers humans have erected. But even we cannot imagine away a disease that so painfully connects the more than 200 countries where COVID is extant and over 24 million people who have contracted it. Among these, of course, are the inhabitants of a city in central China and an American public most of which had never before heard of Wuhan. So too does the problematic legacy of the individual present itself for scrutiny, as self-proclaimed (though unmasked) heroes of their own narrative loudly declaim against public health measures, figuring these as a violation of individual rights and an excuse for tyranny and identifying themselves as/with “rebels” while they protest in Rosa Parks (!) Circle. A careful listener can even hear echoes of social Darwinism—dug up out of our aging pile of specious arguments as nature is called upon as the moral guide we have long known it cannot be. In the repeatedly falsified contention that the disease will act only on the weak and old, we find yet another narrative designed to deflect attention away from the problems of mismanagement. No doubt, this same (usually) unacknowledged strain of social Darwinism underlies the willingness of many to ignore the social and racial inequities that the virus has magnified, especially the disproportionate suffering of Black and LatinX citizens. As we have seen in the history of energy narratives, we have been reminded to be suspicious of contemporary accounts of scarcity, especially when these result in inequitable distribution of resources. Who gets masks and medical care? Who has job security and enough money to ride out the economic crisis? It is thus ever more clear increasingly clear that we can’t separate health policy from economic policy or either of these from the numerous systems by which we divide ourselves and over-compartmentalize our lives and our government. The latest “most compelling call for racial justice since the 60’s” is both way overdue and a clear and present part of our pandemic ecology. It is also, perhaps, one of the most hopeful things to come out of this moment, which has done so much to reveal the cracks in the system. As with the hardworking servants keeping Thornfield in constant readiness for Rochester’s rare visits, many of us are forced to recognize the critical labor of the often unacknowledged Other: not only the first responders and the healthcare workers, but also those who risk their lives to work the factories and pack the meat and stock the grocery shelves. And the virus, by

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keeping us home, has not only decreased our use of fossil fuels, but has made visible how much we have, under “normal” circumstances, have been polluting our world. Just outside my window, in the near suburbs of Philadelphia, the flowers are brighter and the greenery exploding. Along with the ubiquitous deer and the seasonal visitations of birds, two foxes and a groundhog have (re?)claimed their domains. Extremely suspicious of nostalgia, I am by no means suggesting we go back to horse and buggy or level our cities in search of a pristine nature or (most emphatically) allow more people to die because a decrease in human population serves the environment. But I have hope that we may become more cognizant of the daily damage we do and perhaps rethink what may not be so necessary after all, even to our modern lives. Commuting, perhaps? A life on Zoom, with all of its emotional and mental effects, has also given many of us a visceral sense that we need each other. And this knowledge is another source of hope, for if we are to make improvements of any kind, we cannot work in isolation.

Glossary of Ecocritical Terms

Abnatural  A term used by Jesse Oak Taylor to refer to the state of affairs in the anthropocene, in which nature “exists in a state of perpetual withdrawal.” Unlike the stability often implied by “nature,” the abnatural is elusive, adaptive, and is other than itself, and entangled with the artificial (Taylor Sky 5). Anthropocene  A period distinct from previous eras in which humans have significantly altered the Earth’s landscapes and climate. Some locate the beginnings of the anthropocene around the early nineteenth century, at the start of the industrial revolution. Others say it started much earlier. Anthropocentrism  A human-centered point of view. A conceptual framework that understands the human as the most important element in the environment. Capitalocene  The era (since roughly the fifteenth century) during which capital shapes relationships within the world. The word implies that capitalism not merely an economic system, but shapes more widely the relations among humans and all of nonhuman nature. Cognitive dissonance  A psychological state in which an individual has conflicting thoughts, beliefs, or perceptions of reality. Cultural mythologies  The stories of a culture that shape its shared worldview and values. The term is used here to refer in particular to the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. J. Gold, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68604-8

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stories that we tell ourselves about our relationships with both cultural others and nonhuman nature. Doctrine of Uniformity  A fundamental principle of science, especially important to Darwin and his contemporaries, that holds that the natural laws and processes currently observable in the world are the same ones that have always and everywhere governed the universe. Ecocriticism  A multifaceted and interdisciplinary field of literary study that looks to literature for thoughtful examination of the ways we think of and treat the environment and ourselves. Ecocritics often insist on the ethical and practical implications of their study, though their objects of study and methodologies vary widely. Ecological Culture  One in which shared values and practices are geared toward healthy and sustainable living within an ecosystem. Ecological imaginary  Refers to the ways our imagination/conceptualization of the ecology we inhabit shapes our interaction with it. A particular kind or effect of cultural mythology. Ecology  Generally used to refer to the branch of biology that studies the relationships between organisms and their environments, we also use “ecology” to refer to a more broadly interdisciplinary approach incorporating multiple branches of biology as well as other scientific disciplines, including geography, genetics, evolutionary biology, chemistry and physics, with practical applications in agriculture, medicine, urban planning, and so on. In 1866, Ernst Haeckel defined “ecology” as ‘the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and organic environment; including above all, its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants with which it comes directly or indirectly into contact’ (qtd. in Parham GMH 258). Ecosystem  Generally refers to a community/network/system of interacting organisms and their physical environment. For our purposes here, we take a cue from Arthur Tansley, who coined the term, in order to emphasize the importance of energy in ecosystems theory. We may thus view an ecosystem as a complex assemblage of living and nonliving elements, bound in relations of energy exchange. Energetic closure or thermodynamic closure  Refers to the state of a system in which no energy may be added or lost. A primary concern of this work is that we imagine far more systems to be closed than actually are. Energy  In physics, this is a quantitative property of matter. It refers to the capacity for doing work. Here, we consider energy as a “patterning that

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shapes the behavior of matter at every scale from the subatomic to the universal” (Forms 6). We can understand energy as well as the laws that govern it as a conceptual framework, a form or structure, and a way of thinking about the world which intersects with other such forms and has the potential to help us think more ecologically. The Enlightenment  Refers to a European intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth century emphasizing science, reason and individualism over more traditional values associated with religion. Entropy  Another quantitative property of matter, “entropy” is a measure of energy beyond our reach or the disorder of a system, sometimes articulated as a statistical unlikelihood of the system’s returning to a more ordered form. Epigenesis  Generally used to mean the development of an embryo from an undifferentiated egg cell, here we focus on the understanding that the “development of living bodies is coordinated by a cascading series of influences, encounters between the developing body and its environment” (qtd in Griffiths “Marner” 308). Form  Defined broadly by Caroline Levine to encompass “all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference” (3). Greenwashing  Marketing designed to falsely portray a company or product as environmentally friendly. Human exceptionalism  The notion that humans are fundamentally different from all other species; the human is presumed to be clearly distinct and largely in control (if not fully independent) of the rest of nature. Intersectionality  Refers to the intersection of class, race, gender and all such social categories within and individual or a culture and their combined effects of inequity, discrimination, and oppression. Laws of Thermodynamics  Scientific principles describing the behavior of energy in all of its forms, including heat, light, work, gravitational potential, and more. Contemporary chemistry and physics often name as many as 4 laws, but here we focus on the two most enduring, which were articulated in the mid-nineteenth century by Rudolph Clausius, as follows: 1. The energy of the universe is constant. 2. The entropy of the universe tends toward a maximum. Localism  Philosophy, worldview, or preference that prioritizes the local.

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Glossary of Ecocritical Terms

Macrocosm  The whole or totality of a complex structure or system. May refer to the world or the universe, as suggested by its incorporation of the term “cosmos.” Microcosm  A community or place or system that encapsulates in miniature the characteristic qualities or features of a larger system, of the macrocosm. Naturalize  To treat something as if it were natural. Generally, this refers to widespread cultural concepts, such as gender roles or racial difference or ideas such as progress; the critic using the term “naturalize” does so to suggest that such concepts are not actually inherent in nature external to culture. The term “naturalize” is also (and outside of academia, more commonly) used politically (when a foreign-born individual is admitted to citizenship) and biologically (when a plant or animal species is established in a place to which it is not indigenous). Nature-skeptical  A term used by ecocritic Kate Soper to refer to writing and attitudes that are suspicious regarding the social or political deployments of terminology invoking the so-called natural. Parasitism  The dependence of one organism on another to survive— often detrimental to the hosting organism. Pathetic Fallacy  The attribution of human feelings and responses to inanimate things or animals, especially in art and literature. John Ruskin coined the term in his Modern Painters (1856) to critique what he saw as a sentimentally flawed mode of representation in art, especially among the Romantics. Place  “Space to which meaning has been ascribed” (Buell FEC 63). Romanticism, the Romantics, romantic  Refers here to an artistic and intellectual movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, its practitioners, and ideals or attitudes, including emphasis on the admiration of nature and individual feeling as a key component of experience and knowledge. Semiosphere  Metaphorical sphere in which interconnected systems of signs are in operation. The domain/ecology defined by a semiotic system shared by multiple organisms. Semiotic system  Any system of signs and the processes by which they are interpreted. Social ecology  A study of the mutual relations of humans and their environments, presuming a continuity between nature and society. Symbiosis  The interdependence of two or more organisms in a mutually beneficial relationship.

  Glossary of Ecocritical Terms 

201

Toxic Discourse  Term used by Laurence Buell to refer to ecocritical writing driven by the wish to expose human responsibility for poisoning or otherwise creating a toxic environment. Toxic Obfuscation  A term I use to evoke the largely invisible counterpart to Buell’s “toxic discourse,” toxic obfuscation conceals rather than reveals ecological and social problems attendant on industrialization and imperial expansion. Toxic Penetration/Interpenetration  The failure to contain waste and other poisons; the spread of these through neighborhoods, communities, the nation, and the world. Traitorous Identity  Refers to Val Plumwood’s understanding of a kinds of human identity that builds on a personal sense of oppression to understand or empathize with human and nonhuman others who are differently oppressed (205). Transformability  Here refers mostly to a central principle of energetic relations. Emphasizes the changeability of energy at the base of all chemical and physical processes. Umwelten  The world as experienced by a particular organism; the worldview of any being. Victorian era, the Victorians  Refers to the period during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901) and to the inhabitants, especially the English, of this period.

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Index1

A Abnatural, 96, 96n8 Affordances, 21, 72, 76 Anopheles maculipennis, 140 Anson, George, 92 Anthropocene, 20, 23, 84, 96, 96n8, 179, 197 Anthropocentrism, 2, 13, 29, 60, 70, 71, 79, 88, 117, 118 Apricots, 77, 84, 91, 92, 103 Austen, Jane, 16 B Bacteria, 14, 28, 171, 188, 189 Bate, Jonathan, 6 Beech (Fagus sylvatica), 95 Bee Movie, 30, 37 Beer, Gillian, 10, 11, 25, 60 Bildungsroman, 2, 81, 117, 137, 139, 144, 183

Boltzmann, Ludwig, 37–67, 79, 143, 170 Botkin, Daniel, 9, 10, 23n3, 62 Brontë, Charlotte, 4, 16, 74, 105, 108, 109, 123, 130, 169, 182 Brooks, Cleanth, 33 Buell, Lawrence, 5, 6, 43, 56, 139, 141, 145–147 C Cabbage, 12, 25 Carson, Rachel, 10 Choi, Tina, 32, 54, 144 Cholera, 140 Climate change, 19–21, 42, 42n4, 82, 166, 168, 173, 179, 192 Closed systems, 9, 19, 24, 28, 29, 32, 35, 48, 49, 52, 54, 57, 66, 67, 70, 71, 76, 77, 98–100, 124 See also Closure

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. J. Gold, Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68604-8

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212 

INDEX

Closure, 2, 9, 13–15, 19, 21–24, 24n5, 26, 26n7, 27, 32–34, 37, 42, 48, 49, 52–55, 57, 66, 67, 69–77, 79, 84, 85, 95, 98, 100, 103, 105, 106, 110–112, 117, 120, 121, 130, 138, 139, 141–145, 147, 149, 150, 152, 153, 158–160, 162, 163, 173, 174, 180–183, 187, 194, 198 Code, Lorraine, 5 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 134 Conservation, 15, 54, 62, 76, 113, 144, 149 Cregan-Reid, Vybarr, 20 D Darwin, Charles, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 25, 26, 33, 37–67, 69, 75, 77, 78, 80, 83, 84, 89, 99, 103, 113, 114, 124, 139, 166, 169, 172–174, 181, 186, 187 Descent of Man, 45, 63, 83, 101, 173, 186n5 Dickens, Charles, 16 Dracula, 31, 180 Dune, 47 E Ecocriticism, 4, 15, 84 Ecology, 3, 5, 8, 11, 13, 15, 25, 27, 30, 34, 38, 41–45, 47–49, 54, 57, 62, 71, 78–81, 127, 129, 141, 152, 173 Ecosystem, 9, 13, 14, 23, 24, 26–28, 33, 39, 45–48, 52, 53, 55–57, 62, 63, 74–76, 79–81, 119, 141, 151 Elizabeth I, 140 Energy, 2, 3, 9, 13–24, 26, 27, 30, 32n13, 35, 37–39, 42, 44–50, 53, 54, 56, 58, 60–67, 69–76,

72n1, 78, 79, 81, 83, 84, 94, 97, 99, 101–103, 105–107, 110, 112–115, 117–119, 126, 131, 132, 134, 138, 142–144, 149, 151, 167, 170, 181 biomass, 22 chemical, 18 energies, vii, 2, 20, 63, 73, 74, 81, 88, 90–92, 94, 98, 99, 101, 106–108, 110–114, 116–119, 124, 126, 127, 130, 137–139, 159, 164, 170, 172, 176, 178, 185, 188 as form, 21, 23 gravitational, 21, 22, 45 kinetic, 22, 48–50 mechanical, 18 potential, 18 solar, 2, 18, 66, 145, 168–170, 181 sources of (see Fuel) Engines, 50, 51, 56, 170 Enlightenment, 7, 9, 28, 84, 87, 91 Entanglement, 2, 14, 20, 22, 25, 37, 38, 43, 44, 53–55, 57, 58, 71, 76–80, 84, 91, 173 Entropy, 17, 19, 21, 40, 45, 46, 49, 97, 143, 149, 171 Evolution, 3, 11, 38–43, 46, 50, 52, 60–64, 69, 78, 83, 139, 168, 170, 174, 181, 189, 191, 192 F Form, 7, 10, 11, 15, 18, 22, 28, 34, 45–47, 54, 56, 58, 67, 72n1, 73–77, 94, 111, 129, 132, 139, 142, 164, 178, 191 Fuel, 5, 15, 18, 20, 50, 61, 62, 107, 170 coal, 20, 75 fossil, 2, 15, 19, 20, 70, 152, 176 petroleum, 20, 75 Fuller, Jennifer, 122, 131

 INDEX 

G Gagnier, Regenia, 44, 146 Garrard, Greg, 4, 176 Glotfelty, Cheryl, 6, 13, 14, 33, 119 Great Expectations, 1, 16, 35, 59, 64, 67, 70, 73, 75, 77, 78, 81, 85, 98, 101, 137–162, 169, 182 Greenwashing, 153 Griffiths, Devin, 25n6, 26n7, 41, 51, 67, 129, 130n1 H Haeckel, Ernst, 43–46 Haraway, Donna, 14n4, 25, 26n7, 27–29, 72, 179 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 31 Herbert, Frank, 47 Hoffman, E. T. A., 53 Household Words, 140 Human body, 14, 143 Huxley, T. H., 6, 8 I Individual, the, 13–15, 24, 28–32, 34, 35, 37, 46, 51, 62, 67, 70, 74, 86, 101, 107, 117, 119–121, 123, 125, 143, 145, 182 Interdisciplinarity, 44 Intersectionality, 14, 28 J Jane Eyre, 1, 4, 16, 27, 30, 35, 37, 59, 63, 67, 70, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 81, 85, 98, 101, 105–108, 110–112, 114–121, 123–127, 131–134, 138, 139, 142, 147, 169, 182, 189 Joule, James Prescott, 37–67, 69, 78, 79, 170

213

K Keats, John, 33 Knox, Robert, 126 Kreisel, Deanna, 26n7, 41 Kuhn, Thomas, 7, 8 L Larch (Larix decidua), 95 Laurel (Laurus nobilis), 88, 95 Le Guin, Ursula, 30, 118–120, 124 Leckie, Barbara, 54, 152 Legend, John, 34 Levine, Caroline, 21 Levine, George, 10, 85 Liebig, Justus von, 56 Liu, Alan, 5 Lyell, Charles, 40 M MacDuffie, Allen, 8, 15, 20, 64, 66, 83n1, 112, 144n1, 149, 158n2 Machinery, 9, 48–53, 59, 61, 62, 170 Maddow, Rachel, 31, 31n9 Malaria, 138–140, 151, 162 Malthus, T. R., 59, 60, 94, 123, 125, 169 Mansfield Park, 1, 16, 35, 67, 70, 74, 75, 77, 80, 84, 85, 87, 97–100, 102, 105, 169 Mayhew, Henry, 54, 55, 57, 58, 152 Microcosm, 24, 116, 128, 141, 150 Mill, John Stuart, 6, 7, 72, 109, 177–178 Miller, John MacNeill, 33, 34, 79, 125, 134 Modern man, 28, 29 Morley, Henry, 140 Morton, Timothy, 6–8, 27, 33, 34, 53, 72, 79, 81, 187

214 

INDEX

N Natural theology, 40, 43, 51 Nature, 3–10, 5n1, 13, 14, 16, 19, 25–31, 39, 41, 42, 44–46, 49, 51, 52, 59–62, 64, 70, 72, 73, 75, 77–81, 84–91, 94, 96, 96n8, 106–108, 110, 112, 113, 119–126, 129–131, 133, 134, 139, 155, 157, 158, 167, 171, 174, 177, 185, 188, 189, 191, 197–200 Nature-sceptical, 108 See also Soper, Kate Nebular hypothesis, 50, 168–169 New Critics, the, 33

R Race, 5–7, 11, 12, 32, 75, 83, 113, 119, 123, 125, 126, 171, 173, 175–177, 185, 188, 191, 199, 200 Racism, 126, 175 Recycling, 54, 59, 151–154 Repton, Humphrey, 93, 93n5, 94, 111 Resource(s), 10, 11, 20, 30, 31, 40, 54, 55, 59–66, 74, 75, 81, 85, 87, 97, 98, 100–103, 105–108, 112, 113, 117–119, 127, 128, 134, 138, 146–149, 153, 161, 162, 168–171, 181 Ruskin, John, 6, 9, 166, 167

O Open ecologies, 23–28 Origin of Species, 8, 11, 38, 39, 43, 46, 51, 52, 55, 59–65, 77, 89, 139, 172, 173, 186 Ozone layer, 5, 5n1

S Samyn, Jeanette, 26 Scarcity, 2, 59, 66, 73–75, 78, 84, 97, 100, 102, 106, 121, 140, 169, 170, 195 Schlossberg, Linda, 116, 123, 124 Schrödinger, Erwin, 46, 47 Science, 2, 3, 6–10, 12, 16, 17, 21, 23–25, 28, 31, 37–39, 42–45, 48, 52, 62, 69, 71, 82, 83, 99, 144, 149, 152, 169, 171, 175, 177, 183, 185, 191 Scott, Heidi, 15, 20, 24n4, 95, 113 Semiosphere, 157 Silas Marner, 129 Skeptical reading, 3 Snow, C. P., 17 Soper, Kate, 4, 5, 108, 124, 200 Stability, 2, 9, 11, 41, 48, 52, 53, 72, 77, 178, 181, 189, 197 Sterne, Laurence, 95 Sun, 24, 34, 39–42, 47, 48, 56, 89, 114, 143, 152, 166–169, 176, 177, 181, 189 Symbiosis, 26, 28

P Paley, William, 51 Paradigm, 7, 10, 41, 49 Pathetic fallacy, 4, 9 Perspectival agility, 129, 183 Physics, 2, 17, 19, 21, 23–25, 27, 32, 34, 35, 38, 45, 51, 53, 61, 69, 70, 75, 83 Plasmodium vivax, 140 Plumwood, Val, 5, 13, 15, 32, 106, 117, 120, 127–129, 134 anthropocentric culture, 5 Population, 55, 57, 59, 60, 66, 74, 97, 105, 114, 127, 129, 138, 153, 196 Pride and Prejudice, 38, 74, 93, 97–99 Psomiades, Kathy Alexis, 126

 INDEX 

T Tansley, Arthur, 23, 39, 44, 45 Taylor, Jesse Oak, 20, 84, 96, 166 Thermodynamics, 8, 15, 17, 19, 20, 22, 24, 24n5, 27, 29, 32, 35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 45, 46, 48–50, 53–55, 66, 69–71, 74, 76, 93, 99, 107, 112, 117, 144, 149, 163, 167, 169, 192, 194 laws of, 15, 17, 19, 20, 49, 55 non-equilibrium, 19, 24 second law, 8, 18, 19, 32, 45, 144, 147, 167 Thomson, William (Lord Kelvin), 37–67, 169 Tondre, Michael, 15, 20 Toxic discourse, 56, 141, 147 Transformation, 2, 18, 22, 32, 45, 49, 54, 76, 158, 172 Typhus, 77, 120, 123–125, 128, 129, 138, 140, 189

215

V Versailles, 88 Voyage of the Beagle, 40, 58, 63–65, 113 W Wallace, Robert, 126 War of the Worlds, 1, 16, 35, 53, 67, 70, 75, 77, 79, 163–165, 167–169, 173, 175, 177, 179–184, 180n3, 187, 189, 192 Waste, 9, 24, 40, 47, 52–56, 58–62, 65, 144, 146, 152, 153, 170, 171, 201 Wells, H. G., 9, 16, 44, 53, 67, 74, 79, 81, 82, 164–168, 170, 171, 174–185, 180n3, 187, 189–192 Wholism, 33 Wilde, Oscar, 33 Wilderness, 84, 95, 103, 113, 133, 156, 159 Williams, Raymond, 6, 72 Woolf, Virginia, 115, 116 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 4 Wordsworth, William, 4–6, 85–88